Ong Teng Cheong - Presidency

Presidency

Ong was diagnosed with cancer of the lymphatic system in 1992. He became Singapore's first elected President a year later, and it was a presidency marked by many charitable projects (the largest of which is the President's Star Charity, an annual event initiated by Ong), which helped many Singaporeans. Ong stepped down as President at the age of 63. Ong ran for the presidency under the PAP's endorsement. He ran against a reluctant Chua Kim Yeow (Chinese: 蔡锦耀), a former accountant general, for the post. A total of 1,756,517 votes were polled. Ong received 952,513 votes while Chua had 670,358 votes, despite the former having a higher public exposure and a much more active campaign than Chua.

However, soon after his election to the presidency in 1993, Ong was tangled in a dispute over the access of information regarding Singapore's financial reserves. The government said it would take 56 man-years to produce a dollar-and-cents value of the immovable assets. Ong discussed this with the accountant general and the auditor general and eventually conceded that the government only had to declare all of its properties, a list which took a few months to produce. Even then, the list was not complete; it took the government a total of three years to produce the information that Ong requested.

In an interview with Asiaweek six months after stepping down from presidency, Ong indicated that he had asked for this audit based on the principle that as an elected president, he was bound to protect the national reserves, and the only way of doing so would be to know what reserves (both liquid cash and assets) the government owned.

In the last year of his presidency (1998) Ong found out through the newspapers that the government aimed to submit a bill to Parliament to sell the Post Office Savings Bank (POSB) to The Development Bank of Singapore. The POSB was, at that time, a government statutory board whose reserves were under the president's protection; this move according to Ong, was procedurally inappropriate and did not regard Ong's significance as the guardian of the reserves; he had to call and inform the government of this oversight. In spite of this, the sale proceeded and the Development Bank Of Singapore owns POSBank and its name to this present day.

Ong received an Honorary Appointment of The Order of St Michael and St George from Queen Elizabeth II in 1998.

Ong decided not to run for a second term as president in 1999 partially due to health reasons.