Koon Swan: I try to forgive

FORMER MCA president Tan Koon Swan said a myriad of thoughts ran through his mind when he heard that former Singapore prosecutor Glenn Knight had apologised for wrongly prosecuting him in the Pan-El crisis in the mid-1980s, Sin Chew Daily reported.

Tan, who is on a business trip to Hainan Island, China, said he had not decided whether to take legal action against the Singapore government.

He said he was jailed for a year in Malaysia in 1988 after serving a jail term in Singapore.

“I was then declared a bankrupt,” he said. “I still remember the difficult times I had to go through then.”

Tan, who is a property developer with several projects in China, ended his bankruptcy in 1995.

A devout Christian, Tan said it was akin to being reborn after going through the difficulties.

“I try to forgive those who had changed my life.”

In 1985, Knight, who was the first director of the Singapore Commer-cial Affairs Department (CAD), prosecuted Tan, who faced 15 charges including criminal breach of trust (CBT) and share manipulation after the collapse of Pan-El Industries which temporarily halted the Singapore and Malaysian stock exchanges.

Tan, who had a stake in Pan-El, pleaded guilty and was jailed two years and fined S$1mil then. He quit as MCA president after his sentencing.

> China Press reported that thieves had broken into a semi-wooden house at an ostrich farm in Sungai Batang Kali in Selangor six times within two months.

The thieves, believed to be from two different groups, had carted away most of the things and only left behind a fish tank, a sofa and a bed for the 63-year-old owner.

Other News & Views is compiled from the vernacular newspapers (Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese and Tamil dailies). As such, stories are grouped according to the respective language/medium. Where a paragraph begins with a >, it denotes a separate news item.