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SINGAPORE – A former domestic worker has been acquitted by the High Court of stealing items worth more than $ 34,000 from the Chairman of the Changi Airport Group (CAG), Liew Mun Leong, and his family.
Miss Parti Liyani, who worked for the family from 2007 to 2016, had appealed to the High Court against her conviction and sentence of two years and two months in prison.
Her attorney, Mr. Anil Balchandani, who acted pro bono, had argued in her appeal that she was being incriminated to prevent her from filing a complaint against the family for illegal deployment.
Mr. Anil said that in addition to working in the family home, Ms. Parti, who is Indonesian, was also told to clean the office and home of Mr. Liew’s son Karl.
On Friday (September 4), Judge Chan Seng Onn allowed his appeal.
He discovered that the family had “wrong motives” and wanted to prevent her from going to the authorities.
The judge also found that there was a break in the chain of custody for the allegedly stolen items, which were tampered with by family members before the items were photographed and confiscated by police five weeks later. This created a reasonable doubt as to whether the allegedly stolen items had been accurately documented by the police.
Judge Chan also noted that two statements were taken from Ms. Parti without an interpreter.
The judge also considered Mr. Karl Liew’s testimony to be “highly suspicious”. The younger Mr. Liew had claimed in court that several pieces of women’s clothing, allegedly stolen by Miss Parti, belonged to him as he liked to cross-dress.
Anil told the court that he would submit an application for compensation to be paid to Ms. Parti, who has not worked for the past four years.
After the verdict, Ms. Parti sobbed in relief and hugged her lawyer and the staff of the Humanitarian Organization for the Economy of Migration, a non-governmental organization.
During Ms. Parti’s district court trial, Mr. Liew Mun Leong testified that for years he suspected her of stealing when things disappeared at her Chancery Lane home, but his wife told him that it may not have been the maid who took it. I take them.
Mr. Liew said that he finally decided to end his employment in October 2016. The last straw was the loss of a portable power bank given to him by a French university that had invited him to speak as a guest.
As he was abroad, he asked Karl to supervise the termination of his service and his repatriation to Indonesia.
On October 28 of that year, Karl Liew told Miss Parti that he would no longer work for the family and gave her about three hours to pack her belongings.
She agreed to pay for the three boxes to be sent home and the maid returned to Indonesia.
The next day, the family opened the boxes to check the contents and found many of their belongings inside. A police report was made after the CAG chairman returned to Singapore.
But Anil argued that the allegedly stolen items were discarded objects, Miss Parti’s belongings or things that someone else had put in the boxes.
This article was first published in The times of the strait.
