CHC Trial: What kind of game is Kong Hee playing?

Hello everyone. I am amazed that the CHC trial has taken this long, just hurry up and sentence them already, how much longer are you going to take?. We have been pouring over the details of this trial for over two years already and they are still going to court? Allow me to discuss Kong Hee's latest tactic today - it was reported in Yahoo News Singapore that Kong Hee was "shocked" upon hearing these allegations for the first time. Now what kind of defence is that? To quote the Yahoo report: City Harvest church founder Kong Hee was “shocked” when he first heard of the allegations made against the church on 17 January 2003, he said while taking the stand on Monday in the fifth tranche of the trial.

So what is going on here? He is playing the 'blame it on the boogie' defence - let me break this down for you. It is apologizing without taking any responsibility - it is a tactic which allows you to deal with the angry customer without actually having to take any of the blame for it. It's nothing new really and I have used it many times before. Years ago, I worked for this company which was an expert with this tactic. We had a code name it: Sandra - or rather, "blame Sandra". Now Sandra doesn't exist, the company had never employed anyone by that name but whenever something goes wrong, we would apologize on behalf of Sandra. Yes we'll blame Sandra whenever anything goes wrong.

So my usual spiel would go like this, "I am so sorry my colleague Sandra handled this - she is new and inexperienced and I will definitely have a word with her manager about this. It is unacceptable that Sandra made this mistake and please let me assure you that she will be disciplined for this today and the matter will definitely be taken very seriously by our management. I have already had a stern word with her this morning, she realized what she has done wrong and she feels really bad about what has happened. She is currently being spoken to by the MD himself. Our HR department takes issues like this very seriously. Let me see what I can do to make things right for you please."

Oh poor Sandra has been disciplined, scolded, punished, suspended, sacked - you name it - this imaginary lady has taken the fall for everyone in the office whenever we screwed up and the customer was just glad that someone got punished severely for the mistake and it wasn't hard to apologize for something that was not your fault, because of course, it was all Sandra's fault, the stupid, incompetent, negligent, foolish, careless, lazy (not to mention imaginary) colleague. Even when I had personally made stupid mistakes, I had blamed it all on Sandra when confronted by the client. Why take responsibility (and face the consequences with the client) when I can blame it all on Sandra? "I am so very sorry, I had an urgent dental appointment and spent the day at the dentist yesterday and Sandra was covering for me. I would have handled it myself but I was having a broken tooth repaired, I was bleeding a lot." Oh and if we have used 'Sandra' once with a client (and she has been 'sacked' as a result of her mistakes), we would then use 'Sarah', Sandra's replacement. After Sarah, we would use Sally and then Samantha, followed by Sasha. Basically, any female name starting with the letter "Sa" was our default "Sandra" scapegoat. Unethical, totally. Illegal? Probably not.

I'm so sorry about what Sandra did...even if had nothing to do with me!

Essentially, Kong Hee is pleading ignorance (and by the same token, innocence) and expressing some remorse at the same time - the same way I would plead ignorance of whatever silly mistake 'Sandra' made and damn I feel bad about what she did, but still I could not have been responsible for her mistakes if I wasn't even aware of what she did in the first place. Here's the best case scenario that Kong Hee is trying to portray: he is so far up the hierarchy in CHC that he couldn't possibly micromanage every single little aspect of the church's operations, so if something goes wrong somewhere, then it could have happened without his knowledge or authorization - thus you couldn't possibly hold him personally responsible for the round-tripping. It was someone else's fault, someone else who committed the crime without Kong Hee's knowledge or permission. Thus he is at best guilty of incompetence when it comes to managing his church, allowing people to get away with mistakes like that. That is a far lesser crime than personally orchestrating financial fraud by misappropriating more than $50 million worth of church funds to finance his wife’s singing career.

The key difference between CHC and what we did at my former company is that whilst 'Sandra' is a completely imaginary scapegoat, Kong Hee is willing to let the other employees in CHC take the fall on his behalf. Clearly, these people are so in awe of Kong Hee they would gladly sacrifice themselves just to save their beloved leader.  The question is: would the judge (and indeed, the public) buy this kind of excuse defence? I shall let you answer that question in the comments section below. Personally, I see it as a desperate last resort and to keep himself out of jail by sacrificing the rest of those on trial as scapegoats. Will it work? Personally, I am not convinced in the slightest and some of Kong Hee's behaviour in this trial has totally baffled me in a "who the hell are you trying to kid?" way. So I am going to reserve judgement for now - maybe he does have a chance of getting away with it after having wriggling for so long. And if he does, well, then that would say far more about justice in Singapore than CHC or Kong Hee really.

Do let me know your thoughts on this issue. Feel free to leave a comment below, many thanks for reading!