Yuen Wai Loon v Public Prosecutor

Choo Han Teck J:

[1] The Appellant is a Malaysian national working in Singapore for Singapore Airlines. While on a trip to Phuket in Thailand he bought several truncheons and placed them in his check-in luggage for the flight back to Singapore. The truncheons were detected when the Appellant’s luggage was scanned at the Singapore Budget Terminal upon the Appellant’s arrival back in Singapore on 28 February 2007. A year later, on 25 February 2008 the Appellant was charged under section 18(1) of the Private Investigation and Security Agencies Act (Cap 249), (“PISAA”). PISAA was repealed on 27 April 2009. The governing legislation has been re-enacted in the Private Security Industry Act (Cap 250A) (“PSIA”). The Appellant was convicted under s 18(1) of the PISAA and sentenced to pay the maximum fine of $1,000 and in default to serve one week’s imprisonment. Section 18 of the PISAA provided as follows:

[2] The appellant appealed against conviction and sentence. His counsel submitted that s18 did not apply to members of general public and that the District Judge (“DJ”) erred in finding that there was a case to answer when he called on the defence. The purposive approach in the interpretation of statutes was discussed and explained in PP v Low Kok Heng [2007] 4 SLR 183. Section 9A(1) of the Interpretation Act (Cap 1, 2002 Rev. Ed.) encourages a purposive approach in the interpretation of statutes in order to promote the underlying purpose behind the legislation. A purposive interpretation requires the court to approach the literal wording of a statutory provision bearing in mind the main purposes of that provision and the Act in question. It is not necessary for the provision to be ambiguous or inconsistent provision before a purposive approach to statutory interpretation is taken.

[3] The Appellant’s counsel argued that s 18 did not apply to persons who do not carry on or purport to carry on the business of or act as private investigators or carry on the business of a security guard agency. The DJ rejected this argument and held that s18 was of general application and not confined to persons connected with or engaged in the private investigation and security business. The DJ was of the opinion that:

(a) the words “any person” occur regularly throughout the Act and there was no indication anywhere in the Act that the word “any person” has limited application and should only refer to persons who are in the business of private investigation or security agency.

(b) While s 18 is targeted at the employees of private investigations or security guard agencies, it does not state that it is restricted only to that class of persons.

(c) Since its enactment, s18 has been used to prosecute individuals who have had prohibited items in their possession without lawful authority, eg, Kuai Cheng Yan & Anor v PP (unreported).

(d) there is material in parliamentary debates that s18(1) was equally applicable to persons in general.

I incline to the defence counsel’s argument. Section 18(1) was not of general application. First, the Preamble to the PISAA reads as follows:

The purpose of the statute was to regulate people who carry on or purport to carry on the business of private investigators or security guards. The statute was not meant to be of general application. The entire Act concentrated on the regulation of the business of private investigators and security guards. The Minister for Health and Home Affairs said in the parliamentary debate on the PISAA Bill:

On section 18, the Minister said:

When the PISAA was repealed and re-enacted as PSIA, s 18 was not re-enacted in the PSIA. Instead it was moved to the Miscellaneous Offences (Public Order and Nuisance) Act (Cap 184, 1997 Rev. Ed.) (“MOA”), which is an Act of general application to the public. Counsel rightly pointed out that the move from an industry specific statute to a penal statute of general application should incline the court in interpreting s18 to the view that the section as it existed in the PISAA did not apply to members of the general public. The offence under the MOA now reads:

[4] The learned DPP submitted that during the passage of the Private Security Industry Bill, the Home Affairs Minister said:

The learned DPP thus argued that this made it clear that s 18(1) of the PISAA was intended for general application to “any person”. In my opinion, while it might have been the intention to make the section applicable to the general public, Parliament did not do so then. And moving the section to the MOA clarified this. Consequently, I am of the view that the appellant who was not carrying on the business of a private investigator or security guard was not a person to which s18 applied. It is also important that in the interpretation of a criminal statute, any doubt or ambiguity should be resolved in the accused person’s favour.