Just like his wife, The Real Singapore co-founder Yang Kaiheng will be spending his upcoming months in jail for committing sedition, according to various media reports.
In a judgment handed down today, the 27-year-old was sentenced to eight months in jail after he admitted guilt to six charges of sedition, even though he initially intended to fight his charges. The judge noted that although articles on the now-shuttered sociopolitical website were written by his wife Ai Takagi, the site was still Yang’s creation, where he “permitted and allowed the articles to be published”.
Yang and Takagi both set up the website and were raking in thousands of dollars by writing scandalous, provocative material, which were often falsified and edited to sound more xenophobic. Takagi was convicted and sentenced to 10 months in jail earlier in March.
“The accused was made aware that some of the articles published were defamatory but he refused to remove them,” District Judge Chay Yuen Fatt said.
“He was made aware of the articles in question at the very least when investigations against him commenced, but he did not remove the articles until months later.”
The prosecution got what they wanted with the eight-month jail term for Yang. They noted that Yang had treated the investigations and trial lightly, especially after his arguments were dismantled by the prosecutors — essentially Yang had been lying under oath.
The defence, however, argued that Yang had been scarred by the experience, and planned to give up blogging. Too bad then; maybe he and his wife can start looking into writing fiction — they’re familiar with that aspect anyway.
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