Singapore's self-image as corruption-free state on trial

A senior narcotics officer charged with accepting sexual favours, and a pastor accused of siphoning his church's tithes to finance his wife's lavish Hollywood lifestyle - these cases figure among the recent spate of corruption arrests that have come to dominate the headlines in Singapore.

Even for a place known for being among the most corruption-free in the world, these scandals are unprecedented.

It is not that these cases were dramatic, though they read like something lifted from the script of a highly rated cable TV series. Nor is it that the accused are some of the city state's most high-profile public figures. After all, those netted in the past include the director of a major Singapore charity, the National Kidney Foundation, and a Buddhist monk heading a charitable hospital.

Rather, the recent arrests are extraordinary for the timing of their broadcasts. If Singaporeans were in the past subjected to one prominent scandal a year, these past few months exposed for all to see one disgrace after another, sometimes within days.

Last month, pastor Kong Hee, who heads Singapore's most popular Protestant church, and four others were accused of illegally redirecting S$24million (HK$147 million) of the City Harvest Church's building fund to sponsor the pop-star career of Kong's wife, Sun Ho.

This news came barely a month after Ng Boon Gay, the former head of the Central Narcotics Bureau, was charged with receiving sexual favours from an employee of two IT firms in exchange for contracts. A week before that, the former head of the civil defence force, Peter Lim Sin Pang, was arrested on similar 'sex-for-favours' charges.

Other individuals detained on some kind of vice charges include Lim Cheng Hoe, the protocol chief of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for misappropriating funds, as well as Howard Shaw, chief of the environment council and part of the family that had built a movie production and real estate empire in Asia, for being one of 48 men to have slept with an under-age prostitute.