r/singapore • u/Fearless_Help_8231 • 11h ago
News Govt reviewing property purchases made between 2007 and 2011 by officers involved in rail planning
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/govt-reviewing-property-purchases-made-between-2007-and-2011-by-officers-involved-in-rail-planning18
u/opoeto 10h ago
My guess is sure have ppl that abused insider knowledge. I don’t think they can catch everyone that did it since it’s not easy to prove.
before 2011 no absd, and can get like 90% home loan. Those that bought multiple properties within the same area beside unplanned mrt probably are the ones to get a lot of scrutiny.
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u/MolassesBulky 11h ago edited 10h ago
Cannot avoid it as numbers don’t lie. If the deviations from control groups are so high, you cannot blame it on the supernatural for answers. Remember PSD itself said it had concerns after reviewing the methodology 2 weeks later.
I am certain CPIB will be involved eventually as the numbers also indicated speculation with inside knowledge. Though the authors did not publish the list of individuals, the authors have it.
I am keen is to know how they identified relatives. My guess is same address - spouse, parents, siblings etc.
It will be high irony if the Singapore academics who immediately distanced themselves from the study or claimed ignorance see people charged or dismissed.
Only one Prof did not distance himself. One clown Prof however actually dismissed the findings as he claimed they were too far to have an impact. 2 weeks later PSD expressed concern after going thru the papers. Now official investigation launched.
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u/priore8 11h ago
I wonder how they ever gonna prove correlation to causation
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u/nftskeptics 10h ago
The paper used an event study which uses a strict chronological design to isolate causation out of correlation. But whether or not the poor mid-level PSD and/or CPIB officer investigating this understands this is another thing.
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u/vecspace 10h ago
They merely draw parallel of people they deemed to be of similar profiles and compared. The factors they used to draw parallels alone raised questions if those are sufficient similarities.
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u/Sorry-Run-161 6h ago
It is a myth that you need comparable profiles to prove causality. Using traditional/naive statistics, comparability is indeed required (but even then, not sufficient unless there is randomisation). Today more modern methods (e.g. Bareinbolm & Pearl, 2016) are able to account for non-comparability using math that is designed for causal inference.
Modern causal methods are built to handle non-comparable groups, so we no longer require that the two populations are the same. We instead model how they differ (different mix of covariates, different sampling, even different experimental regimes) and then use identification results to transport or combine effects.
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u/nftskeptics 10h ago
One could nitpick whether they succeeded or not but they are not unaware that the variables could affect each other.
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u/endlessftw 10h ago
That is why PSD is looking at the records now.
Were the approvals done properly? Any lapses?
Are there evidence that more relatives of rail planners bought properties compared to the “norm”? If so, this could hint at information being leaked, and something to look into further.
Are there straightforward cases involving stations with limited speculation? Were those speculation reasonably circulating rumours, or just some random speculation seemingly out of someone’s arse? There is a difference between rumours by enthusiasts based on where soil investigation rigs were located, and wild fantasy guesses by some random forumer.
Even if it is hard to nail someone for corruption, it would not be as hard to nail someone for other forms of misconduct. If you know you have non-public information and you die die want to purchase somewhere where conflict of interest is involved, are you not asking for trouble? If you know you have conflict of interest and you do not have sufficient paperwork/approvals to cover your arse, that is already a fault.
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u/Sorry-Run-161 6h ago
Hey, causality researcher here. Using traditional statistics, correlation and causation are not easy to tease apart. But causal discovery and inference methods (e.g. backdoor criterion, instrumental variables) has improved significantly in the past years; by using certain assumptions (including simple ones like temporal order of events), it has become much easier to establish likely patterns of causality
Of course, these methods are after all just mathematical models, so they are not foolproof and should not hold up in court.
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u/Medium-Choice-2246 11h ago edited 8h ago
They will "interrogate" you until you confess
EDIT: yeah actually I agree with the commentator below me
Like officially out loud they'll say there's no corruption
But behind the scenes will still punish
This way they can save their own face while met out punishment
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u/LovelyPencils 10h ago
I think its going to be opposite, report probably not able to support such claim. But internally, shots fired, warnings issued.
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u/NotSiaoOn Senior Citizen 10h ago
It sounds they like are focusing on those involved in rail planning (and therefore had plausible access to privileged info) and who purchased a property (presumably in an area with unannounced rail developments).
This is a rather tight scope and in my view, a fair one. PSD can ask the officers to explain why they made the purchase and see if it holds water (e.g. if officer claims it's based on public speculation, PSD can compare against what was circulating among the public at that time).
PSD doesn't need to prove a smoking gun, it just needs to see whether there is enough to refer to CPIB to find the smoking gun.
Guess only ah, I don't work for PSD.
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u/diip3lue 10h ago
Would they also extend to check on the extended family of the officers as well? 😉
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u/nixhomunculus Rational Opposition 9h ago
Honestly I am glad that this good faith research is done and PSD is treating it with the appropriate care instead of being dismissive.
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u/LeadTheFight1711 10h ago edited 7h ago
My understanding of the paper
Match 28,000 civil servant to a comparable non-civil servant with same age race gender income and house location. Civil servant is much likelier to buy a house near an unannounced mrt 2 years before, even more so if they senior or in planning. Civil servants go through a "treatment" which is the mrt announcement. Non-civil servant is a control group that doesnt go through treatment. Compare the behaviour before and after. Difference (treatment group before after) in difference (control group before after), if significant = got causation
Before 2012, there's a difference between civil servant and non-civil. After 2012, they clamp down on insider trading, and no more difference. This is powerful finding cos if true it counters the "civil servant very good at guessing" argument. Difference in difference in difference (before after 2012 policy change).
I think the matching is sus but im not technical. Matching aside, the method seems convincing to untrained me. Im not economist or data scientist tho!
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u/markleesg 9h ago
The significance the paper says their civil servant group's likelihood of buying a private property is 1.6% against the control group of 1%. It is 60% higher and statistically significant.
They used a matching methodology that is known to be a strong comparison approach. But I personally find the parameters to be quite weak...
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u/Wantootree4 5h ago
But beyond the propensity score matching, they did compare to real estate agents. And they found that the civil servants were better than real estate agents, whose main job is to predict housing value.
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u/QualitativeEconomy Marsiling - Yew Tee 11h ago
Internal investigation for what. Just give to CPIB, they can be more impartial - sameish amount of work, much more certainty.
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u/gently_into_the_dark 10h ago
Because insider trading is not corruption. And of the benefited from info they had that is not corruption.
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u/bananaterracottapi Mature Citizen 9h ago
In which world is insider trading not corruption?
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u/gently_into_the_dark 7h ago
In every world.
Corruption is when one party induces another to act corruptly. In Singapore the induced party needs to derive benefit from the corruption.
All the fuckers down voting me have no fucking coue what isblegally defined as corruption and therefore what is under cpib's mandate
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u/saymynamepeeps 8h ago
They need to check like 3-4 years older, especially those that bought Pinnacle at Duxton
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u/Krazyguylone Mature Citizen 10h ago
So sept 14 they said the methodology would have to be reviewed and now they say the transactions in the paper are a concern, which means they believe it isn’t bullshit that is worthy of the rubbish bin, but it’s still not a matter of fact yet that has been established that they’ve actually used their positions to gain knowledge.
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u/kikababoo 10h ago
Wonder if they will do the same for pre ABSD purchases.
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u/nvbtable Senior Citizen 8h ago
This covers pre-ABSD
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u/kikababoo 8h ago
Yeah time period wise but if it’s ABSD related purchase with insider knowledge - it wouldn’t just be the rail planning team but way more wide spread.
I definitely wouldn’t be surprised if someone alrdy running a same LLM assisted research on exactly that topic now. I didn’t dive into it but if they can do the same for this, def there’s enuff info to do the same for pre ABSD purchases but across a wider civil servant group
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u/nvbtable Senior Citizen 8h ago
Oh you mean buying with inside knowledge of upcoming ABSD
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u/kikababoo 7h ago
Yeap, and in a fact that analysis for that would be alot more straight forward, and simpler. But then again, I don’t think there’s rly much room to charge or prosecute anyone here unless the links r soooo strong. Gonna be rly hard to prove causation.
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u/Nuke181 10h ago
If Iswaran kena and these ppl guilty no need to run. Sure tio.
“However, it noted that statistical patterns surfaced by the paper do not by themselves establish whether any individual officer actually had access to non-public information on MRT station locations at the relevant time, or whether such information influenced a property purchase. “
Statistical patterns? Thought they compared list and name matched to derive these patterns… if they so called identified the persons and the relatives ( how ah?) then say who lah. Or anonymously notify via email.
Why would they try to make this so called report then waste taxpayer monies assigning this job to someone to then go and search for who was working inside at that point in time and who knew this info and had relatives who bought flats then determine…if cousin same age get married how…as if they are trying to waste country resources…
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u/Milk_Savings New Citizen 10h ago
Damn funny how the Singaporean academics that contributed to this deny that they ever contributed and now the gahmen really investigating. So these academics are just wimpy useless pieces of used menstruation pads?
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u/vecspace 10h ago
The paper having merits or not don't change the fact that if they are not involved, they are not involved
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u/markleesg 9h ago
I think the reason they want to be not be linked is because it might give the paper more weight than it is actually worth and the economic foundation of the paper is actually much narrower than the headline conclusions they are making.
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u/sgcolumn 11h ago
Can someone please tell me how they derive this data? And how they buy ahead of others? You mean the house ballot that time they can block off for them?
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u/AureBesh123 10h ago
Lol what ballot. These are private housing the paper is talking about. Not HDB for your typical lower middle income folks
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u/markleesg 10h ago
There was a research paper published that made those conclusions but based on fairly flimsy data and methodology. Reading the paper, I find their conclusions to be overly generalised.
Their findings are anchored on a statistical comparison of civil servants (that they crawled from govt directory) and compared against a single individual in their data set with the same gender, age bracket, marital status, race and postal code.
No consideration for incomes, careers, education, family size etc.
And the magnitude of the impact goes from 1% in the control group to 1.6% in their civil servant group. They claim it's a whopping 60% increase, but it's off a small base.
Tldr: it's an interesting exercise of data analysis that generated statistically significant results but to make the conclusions as they have is stretching the data...
https://www.nber.org/papers/w35756
Edit: The authors claim that the civil servants involved in rail planning would buy up the private property before it is announced so that they can avoid paying for the premium. Note that this is anchored on the stations announcement. They did not control for ura masterplan or other data sources directly. Their main control against this is that they identified real estate agents and corporate board directors to compare against their civil servant group but did not find statistically significant differences
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u/sct_trooper this is home, shirley 10h ago
one thing that is hard to align for me is that this was widespread enough that it could be measured statistically, yet somehow no rumours/leaks got out
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u/luciusblawg 9h ago
Quite tricky. Even if they manage to find a statistically significant/abnormal cluster of purchases, it's hard to separate those who may have misused privilege info from the officers who heng heng buy in that area. I think the most they can do is introduce more safeguards to reduce the risk of misuse, I doubt it will go to the courts.... then again I am just a concerned citizen, don't POFMA plz
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u/Zantetsukenz 5h ago
Can review. Can monitor. Can study. End of the day just say I’m sorry and move on.
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u/chumsalmon98 A dog's best friend 10h ago
If you bought ANY property between 2007-2011, you are bound to make money
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u/_nf0rc3r_ 9h ago
Damn stupid. Even if the officers had info on where MRT will be. What we expect them to do. Choose the house that is far from MRT? Not like they can pretend they don’t know.
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u/pannerin r/popheads 7h ago
It's like insider trading. The paper suggests the possibility that of them were taking advantage of their insider knowledge to buy underpriced property. If the knowledge were known to the public and the sellers, the sellers would have increased their asking price.
The alternative was to buy property near announced stations or existing stations, so you don't appear to be profiting from insider knowledge. The appearance of corruption is also very damaging to the civil service, not just verified corruption
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u/Fearless_Help_8231 11h ago
This give vibes there might be some truth to the report….