Singapore has become much more repressive, and corruption in the Asian financial hub has worsened in the decade since the death of former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, according to his youngest son, who fled to Britain to seek asylum from what he described as a campaign of persecution to silence him.
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Lee Hsien Yang, who has been granted political refugee status in the UK, said that Singaporean authorities have “weaponised” the country’s laws against critics and that he is just the most prominent example of a growing number of Singaporeans fleeing abroad to seek protection from their own government.
Lee cited a tightening of laws on security and rights of assembly and a sharp increase in the number of asylum seekers from the city state over the past decade under the rule of his estranged brother, Lee Hsien Loong, who was prime minister until he stepped down earlier this year.
“Singapore has this veneer that purports to be a sort of affluent, democratic, free country. The veneer is quite thin,” he said in an interview in London on Monday. “Beneath that there is a repressive nature to that regime and there are people fleeing from it.”
The Singapore government reacted strongly on Thursday, accusing Lee of turning a “personal vendetta into an international smear campaign against his father, his family and his country.”
It said Lee had alleged in his asylum application that he and his family were being persecuted by the Singapore government to prevent his son, Li Shengwu, from becoming prime minister.