Photos that surfaced in May 2025 showing Singapore ministers, union chief Ng Chee Meng and billionaire ‘popiah king’ Sam Goi at private dinners with convicted money launderer Su Haijin forced a round of public denials. Goi said he organised and paid for the meals around 2020, before Su was exposed as part of the S$3 billion Fujian-linked laundering case.
Su Haijin, a Cyprus national originally from Fujian, was one of ten people convicted in Singapore's largest money-laundering case. He was arrested on August 15, 2023, during a raid on a large Good Class Bungalow at Ewart Park, where he jumped from a second-floor balcony in an attempt to escape. In April 2024 he pleaded guilty to resisting arrest and money-laundering charges, was sentenced to 14 months in jail, agreed to forfeit more than 90 per cent of about S$170 million in seized assets, and was later deported to Cambodia and barred from re-entering Singapore.
Against that background, the dinner photographs landed with explosive timing, just after a general election. Images shared online showed Health Minister Ong Ye Kung, Transport Minister Chee Hong Tat, former minister Lim Swee Say and National Trades Union Congress secretary-general Ng Chee Meng in social settings with Su. Another photograph showed Sam Goi, the Tee Yih Jia chairman known as Singapore's popiah king, alongside Su and others.
The responses were carefully coordinated. Press secretaries for Ong and Chee said the ministers did not know Su personally, had attended gatherings at a friend's invitation without knowing he would be present, and had no dealings with him before or after. Ng said engaging business leaders was part of his union work, that people often asked for photographs, and that he had no further interactions with Su once investigations and charges became known. Goi told Bloomberg the dinners took place around 2020, before strict Covid restrictions, and that he paid for them as meals among friends.
One strand of the coverage even produced a mistaken identity: a man in a dinner photograph was wrongly identified online as the chairman of Wilmar, prompting a further clarification. That error underlined how quickly the images, stripped of dates and context, were being weaponised in political argument.
The episode mattered less for what it proved — no evidence emerged that any of the officials had business dealings with Su — than for what it revealed about access. Su had held a stake in and a directorship at listed seafood restaurant group No Signboard Holdings, moved in wealthy social circles and collected properties, cars, watches and club memberships while, investigators later found, a company in his name had no real operations and served largely as a vehicle for criminal proceeds.
For Singapore, a city that markets clean governance as a competitive advantage, photographs of senior figures breaking bread with a future convicted launderer are reputationally toxic even when the contact was inadvertent. The ministers' statements stressed exactly that dilemma: public figures meet hundreds of people, some of whom are later shown to be unsavoury. Critics countered that vetting at private billionaire dinners should be better. The photographs remain a lasting footnote to the S$3 billion case, a visual reminder of how thoroughly the Fujian network had insinuated itself into elite social life before the August 2023 raids brought it down.