10 thoughts on the 'integrity' saga and selective use of evidence by VB

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

If you, like Minister Vivian Balakrishnan, haven’t moved on from this whole hawker centre cleaning saga, here are ten thoughts that may interest you. For background reading, please refer to the “dossier” and this email chain between AHPETC and NEA. All observations below are on the assumption that everything in the dossier is true.

1. The NEA officer, Ms Chin Peiyun, clearly misled AHPETC in the email on 7 Feb 2013 by writing “pl note that the Hawkers Association will make the necessary arrangements with their contractors on the scaffold erection/ dismantling during the spring cleaning period from 4-8 March 2013 for the above food centre (538)”. In all likelihood this could be unintentional, but NEA should acknowledge this miscommunication instead of insisting that it was referring to “the scaffolding and canvas covers for the individual stalls”. Nowhere was “canvas covers” mentioned in the email.

2. I am guessing that, after Ms Chin’s email, someone from AHPETC informed ATL Maintenance that the Hawkers Association (HA) will be responsible for the erection of the scaffolding, which led to ATL delivering the quotation to the HA without its asking.

3. Vivian B urged for clean politics and for mistakes to be owned up, which is what everyone wants. But by refusing to admit (1), it makes his grand speech sound a bit rich. The fact that Ms Chin’s email was mentioned but not included in the dossier in full suggests selective choice of “evidence”.

4. A representative from HA claimed that ATL workers only came down on only one day (7 Mar) to clean, even though the hawker centre was closed for 5 days. This was after HA had rejected the quotation from ATL which was for 4 working days. My guess is that Mr Tai Vie Shun, AHPETC’s property manager, could be thinking: “NEA has already said the hawkers are responsible for the scaffolding. If they don’t want to pay, fine, we will just do the normal one day cleaning without scaffolding”.

- http://www.voiddecker.com/2013/07/10...cleaning-saga/


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