Jeya appeal: Goh's grounds

Referring to a video-clip of the rally shown in court yesterday, he noted that the two Workers' Party men had not exchanged words when Mr Tang passed the reports to Mr Jeyaretnam towards the end of his rally speech.

The video footage was at odds with Mr Jeyaretnam's testimony during the hearing last year, when he said Mr Tang had asked him to tell the crowd about the reports.

This, the WP chief had claimed, was the first he had heard of them.

So how did Mr Jeyaretnam know the papers Mr Tang placed on the rostrum were police reports?

How did he know there were two reports, when he had said in his earlier evidence that Mr Tang never told him there were two documents?

Mr Singh suggested that Mr Jeyaretnam's announcement to the crowd, that Mr Tang had just placed the reports before him, was a "device" for the WP secretary-general to endorse Mr Tang's allegations of criminal conspiracy and defamation by Mr Goh and other PAP leaders.

It was "very odd" that Mr Tang did not mention the reports in his own speech earlier.

So the move must have been timed for the WP chief, as the rally's last speaker, to make maximum impact at the "peak time" during the last five minutes, to hurt the ruling party's election chances, said Mr Singh.

Mr Jeyaretnam was thus no "mere messenger" of the reports, he added, noting that the WP chief had stood "shoulder-to-shoulder" with his running mate for Cheng San GRC throughout the hustings.

The coordinated move was politically motivated to sway voters and boost the WP's chances at the polls, he added in his three-hour submission.

The announcement that police reports had been filed suggested that Mr Goh had done something which might warrant a police investigation. It was no less defamatory than if Mr Jeyaretnam had said Mr Goh had committed an offence, he contended.

Urging the court to increase ten-fold the $20,000 damages awarded to Mr Goh, he noted five errors which he said Justice S. Rajendran made in his judgment: The judge did not distinguish between other relevant cases cited by lawyers, which mostly involved neutral reporting by newspapers, and this case, involving Mr Jeyaretnam as a political adversary with an advantage to gain. He did not realise that the only reason Mr Tang filed the reports was for Mr Jeyaretnam to announce them that night.

Mr Tang had said he was too busy to issue writs against the PAP leaders he had threatened to sue.

Yet, he found time to file two police reports and make a trip to the police station, just before attending the WP rally.

His reason for filing the reports, Mr Singh argued, was clearly to use them to gain a political advantage that night. The judge refused to take into account the fact that the police reports would be taken more seriously by the public since both Mr Jeyaretnam and Mr Tang were senior lawyers, who were expected to know better than the layman if an offence had been committed. He confused the consequences of the police reports, including the possibility that an ordinary listener would simply wait for further developments, with the real message.

This was that the WP chief was endorsing an allegation of criminal guilt on the part of the PM and other PAP leaders. He declined to take note of any inclination of the partisan rally audience to put the most defamatory and damaging meaning on what Mr Jeyaretnam said.

Turning to the question of costs, Mr Singh argued that it was wrong for the PM to suffer by being asked to foot 40 per cent of his costs, when he had been vindicated on all points.

He also dismissed the defence's charge that there was a deliberate non-disclosure of the fact that it was Mr Goh and Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew who decided to release the contents of the police reports to the press on Jan 2, Polling Day.

Mr Goh had revealed this readily when cross-examined, he said.

Previous court ruling was 'right'

THE High Court was entitled to find Mr J. B. Jeyaretnam's remarks at the final Workers' Party rally defamatory, even if it was to a lesser degree than was painted by Mr Goh Chok Tong's lawyers, argued the Prime Minister's Senior Counsel K. Shanmugam yesterday.

Addressing the three-judge panel at the Appeal Court, he argued it was wrong for Mr Jeyaretnam's Queen's Counsel to insist that Mr Goh be "pinned precisely" to the innuendo meaning in his statement of claim, and that a lesser meaning could not be accepted.

Citing a 1992 High Court judgment in a case between Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew and Mr Jeyaretnam, Mr Shanmugam pointed out that it was usual for a plaintiff in a defamation suit to plead the "highest defamatory meaning of the words complained".

However, the Court was entitled to find a lower meaning and the defendant would still be liable.

He was responding to Mr Charles Gray, who had argued that Mr Goh ought to be pinned precisely to one defamatory meaning, because by "proceeding to devise a meaning of his own, miles away from the pleaded meaning", the judge had denied Mr Jeyaretnam the chance to defend himself.

Dismissing several Australian and English cases cited by QC Gray, Mr Shanmugam said that the findings in these cases no longer held true, including the view that switching to a lesser meaning, deprived the defendant of making proper submissions.

The issue arose as Justice S. Rajendran had dismissed last September the argument by Mr Goh's lawyers that the WP chief's remarks were defamatory as they suggested the Prime Minister was guilty of criminal conduct.

Instead, he ruled that Mr Jeyaretnam's comments were defamatory to Mr Goh in the sense that they would leave a "broad, negative impression" that Mr Goh could be investigated for some offence or another.

Published in the Straits Times. April 28, 1998