Double Standards

There are two Susan Lims. She is the talented surgeon who performed the first successful liver transplant in Asian history in 1990. You can see her giving a TED talk on "Transplanting Cells, Not Organs" in April 2011, which has garnered 567,316 total views thus far. At the age of 36, Lim rose to the prestigious position of associate professor in surgery. Her hands have been replicated for display at Madame Tussaud's Exhibition, probably in recognition of her surgical skills.

And there's the Susan Lim who was convicted of professional misconduct in respect of overcharging one of her patients, the sister of the Queen of Brunei. She was fined $10,000 by the Singapore Medical Council (SMC) and suspended from practising for three years. The punishment is believed to be among the most severe meted out to an errant doctor, short of being struck off.

The story could have ended there. The law was allowed to take its course, and the good doctor should have been given time off for a period of self reflection and repentance.

“All things whatsoever ye would that men
should do to you, do ye even so to them."

Except for the ugly fact that SMC's lawyers proceeded to practise exactly they had argued against in court. After losing the case by SMC asserting that she had overcharged her wealthy Bruneian patient, Susan Lim ended up facing an over inflated bill to pay the SMC's costs. The irony can't get any better than this.

SMC's lawyers - Senior Counsel Alvin Yeo and Melanie Ho of WongPartnership (WongP) - overcharged by $637,009 (the difference between the original bill amount of $1.007 million and the $370,000 allowed by High Court Judge Woo Bih Li, who reviewed the matter, and eventually allowed that total sum for the bill of costs).

The latest development is that the court has slashed SMC's cost claims, and awarding the council only $317,000 of the $1.33m it was itching to collect (note the numbers keep changing, as if plucked mysteriously from the air). Examples of the overcharging include bills for two expert witnesses which were set at some $52,000, and slashed by the court to $14,000. Ring binders for which SMC had priced at $6 per unit for Dr Lim to pay were cut to $2.50 per unit after the court found it had used the cheaper version in past hearings. Greed knows no bounds.

The end is not yet in sight. When politicians get involved -  and Alvin Yeo is a PAP MP - the muck takes forever to clear. Yang Yin did his homework well, he knew the Kodak moments with Lee Hsien Loong, Grace Fu and Intan Mokhtar will be worth more than the $4,000 he splurged for a fake degree.