AMONG the staff members who received loans from Ren Ci Hospital was Dr Ong Seh Hong, now its chief operating officer and clinical director.
The former head of the hospital's human resources department, Ms Joyce Teng, said that he was given a $60,000 loan in 2000. She reckons that it was probably the biggest loan given out during that time she was employed at Ren Ci, from 1997 to 2001.
Dr Ong's name surfaced on Thursday, the sixth day of the trial against Ren Ci ex-chief Ming Yi, when the subject turned to whether the hospital had a policy on granting staff loans.
The ongoing trial centres on a $50,000 loan Ming Yi had supposedly offered to Mandala Buddhist Cultural Centre but which had ended up with his former personal aide, Raymond Yeung, who used the money to renovate a friend's flat in Hong Kong.
On Friday, Dr Ong, also an MP for Marine Parade GRC, wrote to the media to give his account of the facts and circumstances that led to the loan.
He said he had been offered a job by the hospital in January 2000 to be its director for medical and paramedical services. However, to join Ren Ci, he said he had to settle an outstanding $560,000 staff housing loan with his then employer, the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC).
'One of the conditions for accepting the job in Ren Ci was that Ren Ci was to grant me a loan of $60,000 as a staff loan, to pay off in part the outstanding loan I owed to GIC,' Dr Ong elaborated.
Read the full story in Friday's edition of The Straits Times. .
