SINGAPORE — Senior Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam said on Thursday (June 8) he plans to resign from the People's Action Party (PAP) and step down from his posts as Senior Minister and Coordinating Minister for Social Policies on July 7 to run for president in the upcoming election. Here are six things to know about the 66-year-old, who is stepping aside...
SINGAPORE — Senior Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam said on Thursday he plans to resign from the People's Action Party and step down from his posts as Senior Minister and Coordinating Minister for Social Policies on July 7 to run for president in the upcoming election.
During his time at MAS, he also became a member of the committee chaired by then Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong to review the financial services sector. He was fielded in the newly created Jurong GRC, along with Madam Halimah Yacob — who was also making her electoral debut — as well as then labour chief Lim Boon Heng, Mrs Yu-Foo Yee Shoon and Dr Ong Chit Chung.
He was also made Coordinating Minister for Economic and Social Policies in 2015, and Senior Minister in 2019. These included instituting the Workfare Income Supplement in 2007, and leading the SkillsFuture lifelong learning movement, which was launched in 2014. "It's not just education, it's the way we treat blue-collar workers generally, ordinary workers, whether it's in restaurants or when you're taking transport, everywhere," he said then.
"Everything becomes an opportunity to help someone, an opportunity to understand an issue better so that we can find a solution, or do something novel in the community."But there were few signs in his youth that he would one day enter politics. But young Mr Tharman had no interest in studying medicine. Instead, he devoted his energies to sports - hockey, football, cricket, athletics, volleyball, sepak takraw and rugby — practising almost every day.
But his sporting ambitions were thwarted when he developed severe iron-deficiency anaemia at 17, which required him to pop 25 pills a day for several years. Mr Tharman said in a 2015 interview with The New Paper that he never regarded himself as a poet, "much less a good poet". His passport was impounded on his return to Singapore in 1982, and he was hauled up for questioning by the Internal Security Department .
After a long-drawn trial in 1994, he was fined $1,500 for endangering the secrecy of classified documents.
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