Lee Hsien Yang, a member of the family that led Singapore for decades after its independence from British rule, said on Tuesday that he had been granted political asylum in Britain and accused his nation of persecuting him throughout his brother’s tenure as prime minister.
Mr. Lee said in a statement posted on Facebook that the United Kingdom had determined that he faced the risk of political persecution and could not safely return to Singapore, granting the asylum protection he applied for in June 2022.
“I never imagined in my worst nightmares that I would end up becoming a refugee from a country that my father built,” he said in a phone interview from London, where he and his wife have lived for two years. “But that’s the circumstance that I find myself in.”
Mr. Lee is the youngest child of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first prime minister, who declared the country’s independence from British colonial rule in 1963. Mr. Lee’s older brother, Lee Hsien Loong, was Singapore’s prime minister for 20 years in a term that ended earlier this year, and he remains as a senior minister and secretary-general of the ruling People’s Action Party.
Britain approved Mr. Lee’s asylum claim in August, accepting that he had a “well-founded fear of persecution” and permitting him to remain there for five years, according to a letter from Britain’s Home Office provided by Mr. Lee. He can apply to extend his stay at the end of that period, it said.
Andrea Goh, a spokeswoman for the Singaporean government, denied that Mr. Lee and his family were victims of a “baseless” and “unfounded” campaign of persecution, writing in a statement to The Guardian that the government published on its website: “They are and have always been free to return to Singapore.” The statement was issued in response to an interview with Mr. Lee published in The Guardian on Tuesday.
Britain’s Home Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
During the tenure of Mr. Lee’s older brother, a bitter feud unfolded in Singapore’s first family. Mr. Lee and his sister, Lee Wei Ling, publicly accused their elder brother of abusing his position to increase his personal power. The feud pushed into the public sphere questions about how Singapore should be governed after decades of one-party rule.
Mr. Lee and his sister, who died this month, wrote in a statement in 2017 that they feared the Singaporean government would abuse them and their families, declaring that they did not trust Lee Hsien Loong “as a brother or a leader.” He called their accusations “baseless.”
Central to the siblings’ dispute was an estate battle over a house that belonged to their father, who died in 2015. In a legal case over the handling of their father’s will, a Singaporean court in 2020 found that Lee Hsien Yang and his wife had lied under oath. Mr. Lee said that the ruling was politically motivated, an accusation that the government denied.
“Singapore’s judiciary is impartial and makes decisions independently,” the government spokeswoman said in the statement on Tuesday.
After the ruling, the police invited Mr. Lee and his wife to cooperate in an investigation into whether they had given false evidence in judicial proceedings. In 2022, they informed the police that they would not participate. Mr. Lee said at the time that he was leaving the country indefinitely, fearing government retribution.
“They prosecuted my son, brought disciplinary proceedings against my wife, and launched a bogus police investigation that has dragged on for years,” he said Tuesday in his statement on Facebook.
One of Mr. Lee’s sons was also ordered to pay a fine for contempt of court in 2020 over a private Facebook post in which he criticized Singapore’s courts. The government said it viewed the post as a “contemptuous attack on the Singapore Judiciary” and said he had paid the fine.
Mr. Lee’s announcement that Britain had accepted his asylum claim came a week after he said he was petitioning to demolish the house that belonged to his father, following his sister’s death. He said that he remained a Singapore citizen and hoped it would one day be safe to return home.
But for him to go back, he said, “I’d have to believe that things have fundamentally changed in Singapore and I’m no longer at real risk of persecution.”
“If it doesn’t happen in my lifetime,” he said, “it would be heart-wrenching for me.”
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