In July 2005, the National Kidney Foundation, then Singapore's largest charity, was engulfed by the most damaging charity scandal in the country's history after a defamation lawsuit brought by its own chief executive spectacularly backfired. T. T. Durai, the foundation's long-serving CEO, had sued The Straits Times and its senior correspondent Susan Long over a 2004 article that questioned the charity's lavish spending. But when the trial opened in July 2005, cross-examination exposed a litany of excesses funded by donor money, and Durai abruptly dropped the suit on its second day. Within days, he and the entire NKF board had resigned.
The revelations were staggering. The original article, titled NKF: Controversially ahead of its time?, had reported that a retired contractor had been asked to install a glass-panelled shower, a pricey German toilet bowl and a S$1,000 gold-plated tap in Durai's private office suite, and had balked at the extravagance. Under cross-examination, far worse emerged: Durai collected a monthly salary of S$25,000 and had pocketed a 10-month bonus in 2002 and 12-month bonuses in both 2003 and 2004, totalling S$1.8 million over three years. He had access to a fleet of eight chauffeured cars, the foundation paid the maintenance costs of his personal Mercedes-Benz, and he travelled first class on donor money. The charity had also made false declarations about how long its reserves could last and how many patients it served.
Public fury was immediate. The foundation's signboard at its Kim Keat Road headquarters was vandalised, and more than 10,300 donors called in to cancel their monthly Giro and credit-card donations within days. The outrage deepened when NKF patron Tan Choo Leng, the wife of Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong, remarked that Durai's pay of S$600,000 a year was peanuts, a comment that became a byword for elite detachment. On July 14, 2005, after a meeting with Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan, Durai and the entire board announced their resignations.
The aftermath reshaped Singapore's charity landscape. Gerard Ee, president of the National Council of Social Service, was appointed interim chairman, and a full independent audit by KPMG produced a 442-page report in December 2005 documenting a host of malpractices and a lack of meaningful governance. Durai was arrested in April 2006 and charged under the Prevention of Corruption Act; he later served a jail term in mid-2008 for deceiving the NKF into paying S$20,000 to his interior-designer friend, and faced a S$12 million civil suit from the new board. In October 2005, the government set up an Inter-Ministry Committee to revamp charity regulation, tightening the framework for institutions of public character. The golden tap became an enduring symbol of donor betrayal, and the NKF saga remains the benchmark against which every subsequent charity scandal in Singapore is measured.