The Crooks accusing a Whistle Blower

A Swiss whistleblower, Rudolf Elmer, will be charged in the Swiss court for breaking Swiss banking secrecy laws. Rudolf will be turning his compilation of bank data showing money laundering and tax evasion to WikiLeaks. The data is proof of the banks misdeeds and those of its officials and their customers. Rudolf was the COO of Julius Baer bank in the Cayman Islands but was fired for stealing the information. This is what he said. ‘The one thing on which I am absolutely clear is that the banks know…that money is being secreted away for tax evasion purposes, and other things such as money laundering.’ The bank’s reply is that Rudolf’s aim was ‘to discredit Julies Baer as well as clients’ by spreading “baseless accusations” and passing on “unlawfully acquired” documents to the media and WikiLeaks.’ If Rudolf is speaking the truth, then we have a bunch of criminals suing an innocent man. Accepted technically that he breached the banking laws, but what if the laws were abused by the banks? Would that absolve Rudolf of his crimes? The second part is that the bank has taken the position that Rudolf is lying and falsifying documents. The bank has thus taken a stand and can be hanged for it if it is found to be telling lies instead. The other frightening thing is that states could pass anything as laws, in this case banking secrecy acts, so that they can do criminal and immoral things. And breaking the laws becomes a crime. How neat. It is an open secret that many criminals and robbers parked their money in Switzerland and are protected by these laws. Who should be hanged then? When laws are for wrongful purposes, then the laws are a crime in itself.

Perfect solution to the stock market farce

Asian stock markets are being coerced to cut down their lunch breaks, and better, no lunch breaks to increase their productivity and facilitate cross border trades. The latest victim is Hongkong halving its lunch break from 2 hours to one hours. Tokyo too will have its lunch break cut. Singapore is contemplating of doing away with the lunch break completely, which is likely to happen on 1 March. One of the solid reasons given is to reduce the advantage/disadvantage of differences in trading hours. By doing away with lunch breaks and to extend the trading hours, stock exchanges will now operate with at least similar trading hours or overlapping hours. That will ease off a lot of the disadvantages. To me this is a little foolish. As long as the stock markets across the world are operating at different hours because of the different time zones, no amount of time adjustment or no lunch breaks can be of any great help. The advantage is minimal but the price paid by the stockbrokers is not small. There is a perfect solution to all the farce about different trading hours and trying to bring them as close as possible. Actually there are two answers. One is to operate stock markets on a 24 hour basis. The second is to use Greenwich Time and all stock markets shall operate at the same hours. See, all the farce will go away. Stupid problems need to be solved by stupid solutions. Red herring problems can be solved by applying twisted logics.

We need more cooling measures

The latest bout of cooling measures to curb property prices is touted as a very well thought out plan. The previous three measures thus must be not too well thought out. And if this one does not work out, the next betterer thought out plan will be rolled out. Curbing high property prices is not the only area that needs cooling measures. We need cooling measures for COE prices, university tuition fees and of course medical fees. There were some hints of curbing high legal fees in the private sector. That is also an area that many cannot afford to pay to the top legal eagles. They are so good that they could even demand an arm or a leg from their clients. And affordability is never an issue. So far the only real cooling measure that works is the salary of workers. Real cool man.

NTUC Dental Care

Lee Wei Ling wrote an article in the Sunday Times today complimenting Singapore doctors for not doing unnecessary medical tests and cutting down medical cost. I had an experience last week at NTUC Dental Care when I was coerced in a way to have two Xrays taken or else no treatment. I went just to repair a tooth filling that was chipped off. A simple removal of the existing worn filling and refilling it with new amalgam should do the job. The dental surgeon insisted that two Xrays must be taken as evidence of the state of the tooth and should the hole be too big and necessitate a root canal treatment, then she would be protected in case I complain that it was her fault. I want to say 'f'. This really pissed me off. I was at the verge of sitting up and walk out of the clinic. But I held back as it was a small matter and did not want to waste more time since I had already made the appointment and sitting on the dental chair. The reasoning for the extra two Xrays was unacceptable as it was done for her own protection against complaints by unhappy customers. Here she assumed that I would be an unreasonable customer, that the hole in my tooth could be bigger and required canal treatment, and I would complain against her. So I kenna paid for two Xrays for her protection just in case. At the end, after the treatment, there was no big hole that required canal treatment except a big hole in my pocket that was unnecessary but for her own good. And now, I am complaining for a different reason. I actually did not want to raise this minor issue until Wei Ling's article reminded me of how medical cost can go up for all the wrong reasons. And if my experience is the norm, then many NTUC members or NTUC Dental Care customers must have been made to pay for unnecessary tests. NTUC being an organisation to protect the welfare of workers should rethink this stupid practice and save the workers some money. No, I am not going to complain to Swee Say about this. Too tedious and time consuming. But any NTUC leaders or members reading this may want to take note and bring this up to him. It will save the workers some money and avoid being abused by such arrogant attitude of some practitioners.

Singapore University Education quality up

The tuition fees for Singapore universities and polytechnics will go up in the next academic year. The reason given is that the cost of providing quality education is going up. The fee hikes range from 3% to 6% for universities and 2% to 3% for polytechnics. The increases for NUS and NTU were 4-6% which are higher than SMU’s 3%. At the rate it is going the quality of education in NUS and NTU will improve tremendously over that of SMU. And I can presume that SMU will have to improve its quality next year by higher fee increases just to catch up. Students in NUS and NTU will be celebrating in the increasing quality of their education. Students in polytechnics will have to make do with only 2-3% improvement. If university fees were a guide to the quality of the education provided, then the fee increase must be accelerated. Then it will only be a matter of time when the quality of our university education be betterer than the top universities in the West. And students who can afford to pay more for quality education will be flocking to this education hub for world best university education.