YJE v YJF [2026] SGFC 129

Magistrate Soh Kian Peng:

It was the 21st of September 2026. I was sitting as the duty judge. The Father had come before me to file an application to vary an order of the Family Court under which he had been ordered to pay maintenance for five children.

After reading his application form and asking him questions about his application, I dismissed his complaint (s 152(1) of the Criminal Procedure Code 2010 read with P 3 r 4 of the Family Justice (General) Rules 2024).

This judgment serves as a record of my reasons for dismissing his complaint: s 152(3) of the Criminal Procedure Code 2010.

My starting point is the Father’s application as stated in the form he had filled out. That was the foundation of his entire application. The Father had disclosed the following details in his application.

First, that he was ordered vide MO xxx/2025, to pay a total monthly sum of $1325.00 as maintenance for five children.

Second, the Father sought a downwards variation of that monthly maintenance – he was asking that he be ordered to pay a total sum of $750 as monthly maintenance for the five children.

Third, he gave the following details in support of his variation application:

As I understood it, the basis of the Father’s application was that he could not afford the monthly maintenance for the five children given that he had recently remarried and had new expenses to bear. The Father, however, had not provided any details setting out the extent of the change in his expenses or financial means. He also did not provide any documentary evidence to that effect.

I saw the Father and asked him several questions about his application. Through the course of those questions, it appeared that he had not been entirely forthcoming when he filed his application.

For one, it turned out that he had remarried more than a year ago. My brother judge had noted this in his brief oral grounds when he made the order in MO xxx/2025. When I queried the Father on this material omission, he claimed that he had remarried in Thailand on the 15th of February 2025, and had only recently registered his new marriage in Singapore on 1 September 2026. None of these details, however, were stated in his complaint form. In fact, as I had observed (above at [7]), what the Father had stated in his application form gave the impression that he had recently remarried, and that was the justification for his change in expenses that warranted a downwards variation of the monthly maintenance sums.

Further to that, the Father offered a second reason for his application in response to the questions I posed to him. He said that he had taken out loans in order to secure legal representation. Those loans had to be repaid. He was counting on the flat being sold so that the sales proceeds could be used to pay off those loans. He said that he could not service those loans along with his other financial obligations because his ex-wife was delaying the sale of the flat.

None of these details were disclosed in the Father’s application form. The Father also did not submit any documents to back up his claim.

Given the Father’s lack of candour in making the application, I considered that there was no basis to proceed with his application and dismissed it accordingly.

As a final point, I emphasise that it is incumbent on applicants to fully set out all the details in support of their application together with any supporting documents. They must satisfy the duty judge that there is sufficient basis to proceed with their complaint. They cannot omit material facts and expect that their application will be accepted for filing. In that vein, the declaration which every applicant is required to make is worth noting:

Soh Kian Peng Magistrate

The Father in person and unrepresented.