News

Iris Koh Has Raised $96K for Her Legal Fee & Will Park the Money as Cryptocurrency

2022-02-17 , 11:36 am

On 15 February, the second day of Iris Koh’s crowdfunding donation drive for her legal fees, she managed to receive $48,840.78, which brings up the total amount of donations to $96,016.01, merely $4,000 short of her goal of $100,000.

To thank her supporters, Iris Koh summarised the donations in a helpful Powerpoint Slide Presentation to sentimental piano music and shared it with the Healing the Divide (HTD) Telegram Channel.

The Donation Report

A total of 280 people had donated to her cause, with the highest amount being $4,000.

According to Koh, the most touching donation she received was from a man who had contributed the last $12 in his bank account despite losing his job recently because he still wanted to give.

My man, that’s 4 packets of chicken rice at least.

Besides that, Iris Koh has pledged that any excess donations will go towards the lawsuit of Boy versus Ong Ye Kung first. She updated that the legal representative, the mother of the 10-year-old boy, has already had three meetings in the Attorney-General’s Chamber for this lawsuit.

The rest will go towards the daily expenditure of running Healing the Divide and paying those that work behind the scenes.

Koh extends her thanks to everyone for their generous contributions.

In her words, “I went into the Lion’s Den (police remand) and now I’m back. Everything I have done, I did it because I can’t bear to see people suffering from these mandates. Truth will prevail and God will win. Hold the line.

“I am very humbled and touched by everyone’s generosity and love gifts from the heart. I will continue to fight for freedom and stand for a United Singapore, regardless of vaccination status.”

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Safeguarding Donation Assets by Changing the Money to Cryptocurrency

Although Koh has nearly reached her goal of $100,000, she worries about what will happen to the money, or if the government will somehow manage to put a foot in, before the criminal lawsuit proceedings even begin.

Hence, Koh has decided to transfer the funds into her crypto wallets for safeguarding until the money is made use of.

In the message, it reads: “We are not saying that the government would or not do this, but we are concerned about what they can do and we have to prevent that from happening within legal means.”

In the comment section that followed the announcement, her supporters applaud her for taking into consideration for what the government might do to the funds—like freezing their bank accounts for instance—while others point out that in changing the funds to crypto and back, some money is bound to be lost due to the fluctuating value of cryptocurrency.

A few even wondered if they had to give more donations to make up for the losses.

Changing the Funds into Stablecoins

In response, Iris Koh’s husband, Raymond Ng, sheds some transparency on what they had done to the donation funds:

Firstly, they had converted the money into USD stablecoin, because he didn’t have much faith in XSGD stablecoin.

In technicality, they are not buying cryptocurrency because they don’t really regard stable coins as crypto.

Stablecoins are a type of cryptocurrency that seeks to reduce price volatility, which is done by primarily tracking the value of an underlying asset, with the most common practice being either the US currency or Singapore currency.

There are more complexities regarding what stablecoins are, but that’s not the main topic right now.

Raymond Ng continues, “The main purpose is to store it away from governmental intervention as this whole exercise (the criminal lawsuit) might be politically motivated.”

Then, towards the people that question why they didn’t just put the money in the bank, Ng retorts that they must be very confident that this entire proceeding isn’t politically motivated, such that they would put their trust in a bank’s guarantee.

He even went as far as saying, “If the government ever freezes our account and affects our ability to fund the lawsuit, we would just direct all invoices to you to make payment.”

Alright, we get it, you have a general distrust of the government and the underhanded tactics that might employ just to ensure that they will win the lawsuit against your wife.

In any case, the money is theirs now, they’re free to do whatever they want to do with it, and how they eventually decide to pay their lawyers—either in crypto or some other form—is their business.

Other Movements in Healing the Divide

Besides fundraising, crafting a case for the imminent lawsuits in March, and writing a book, Iris Koh has also decided to host a workshop called Understanding Police’s Power and Individual Rights.

The workshop intends to educate ordinary citizens about Police Powers and the Individual Right that they possess, if they are ever interviewed by the police.

The workshop won’t involve details about the book, “Into the Lion’s Den” that Iris Koh is writing, though the workshop was inspired by police remand she went through and the Minister of Law Kasiviswanathan Shanmugam’s admittance about the police lapse in the Parti Liyani probe.

As such, they have invited Criminal Lawyer Mr Patrick Fernandez, who has extensive experience in interactions with the Police and Attorney-General Chambers in representing the accused.

Owing to the importance of the subject, Healing the Divide is offering tickets to the workshop for free, but there is a paid component that participants can opt for to help offset the costs of the workshop, and the excess will also go towards the other causes that HTD is supporting.

The causes include standing up for the rights of the unvaccinated, the lawsuit of Boy versus Ong Ye Kung, paying the freelancers behind the scenes, and managing the platform in general.

It seems like the HTD Telegram channel is abuzz with activity as per usual.