Believing Yang to be ‘able_tree’, State tries to show user was TRS owner

by Wan Ting Koh

ON THE stand, Yang Kaiheng looked tired and subdued. It was the eighth day of his trial, and he was just yesterday (April 7) forced to admit he had lied to the court. In court today, he was asked twice by the prosecutor if he needed to wash his face.

He didn’t have to. Court ended early at noon today, but not before the prosecution, led by Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) G Kannan, continued its attack on Yang’s testimony, breaking down his defence that he had no role in running The Real Singapore (TRS) website into a blunder of lies and cover-ups.

Yang, a 27-year-old Singaporean and the husband of Ai Takagi who sentenced to 10 months jail last month for her role in running TRS, is facing seven counts of sedition in the ongoing trial.

To start, the DPP repeated a point he said yesterday, that Yang’s testimony so far has been a “material contradiction” from the earlier recorded statements that he had given to the police.

Yang had earlier told police that he had “no idea” whether his friend, Mr Damien Koh, was connected to TRS in any way. But then he had said in court later that he was aware that Mr Koh helped to launch the TRS website, the prosecution said. To this, Yang again admitted he had lied. He had not wanted to implicate his friend in the investigations, he told the court.

For the rest of the time, the prosecution sought to establish the content of the Skype messages to show that the user “able_tree” (possibly Yang, or his wife Takagi) was a business owner of TRS. This person was also responsible for its site maintenance, and thus, critically linked to its daily operations. The messages between Mr Koh and able_tree included discussions ranging from expanding TRS’ business to Malaysia, introducing a forum section, and troubleshooting technical issues on the site.

In Yang’s defence, he had said yesterday that although he had used the Skype account sometimes with his wife next to him, it was his wife who was the actual user of the able_tree Skype account and who had all conversations related to the operation of TRS. The prosecution, however, believes that Yang had an equal hand to play in these discussions.

Apart from discussing the website’s expansion and other technical issues, the user able_tree had also offered to split part of the revenue from TRS with Mr Koh, and spoke of sourcing for potential advertisers. This showed that able_tree held an owner’s responsibility of issuing shares, which was “consistent with able_tree being an owner of TRS”, the prosecution said.

The trial is set to continue on June 22.

 

Featured image by Sean Chong. 

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- Wan Ting Koh