SDP was supposed to host their campaign kick-off on 23 February 2pm at 115 Eunos Ave 3, in an auditorium which is supposed to be able to host 200 audiences, operated by Kingdom Community Church Ventures Pte Ltd. However, on the night before the launch, SDP chief Chee Soon Juan posted a notice on his Facebook talking about the venue change. In it he wrote:
We spent the entire day trying to persuade the company to honour its contract but to no avail. After some frenzied searching, we found another venue at Mandarin Orchard. We are the SDP, we never say die.
You can read the full post by Chee Soon Juan here:
On SDP's website, they noted that they were informed of the cancellation by the venue operators due to reasons such as "JTC inspection" and political reasons.
After this post on their website, JTC became sensitive about the issue writing:
The Singapore Democratic Party (“SDP”) alleges it was forced to change the venue of its Kick-Off Event at the last minute because the owner of the original venue cancelled the event, “citing ‘JTC inspection’ and political reasons”.
It is factually wrong to link the cancellation with JTC’s inspection. JTC had no prior knowledge of the above SDP event. This was a private arrangement between SDP and the venue owner.
You can read the full post by JTC here:
However, SDP made a Facebook post which showed that the venue operators were the one who cited 'JTC inspection' and political reasons as the reasons for the cancellation. They even included an excerpt from the email sent to SDP by the operators:
This is the complete text of the email from Mr Shawn Ling of SLVHub (managed by KCC Ventures) sent on 22 Feb 2019 at 11.35 am:
“Dear Mr Jufri (SDP Organising Secretary),
My deepest apologies as we need to cancel all our events for 23rd Feb 2019 Saturday as we have a last-minute unforeseen JTC Inspection.
They also asked JTC to "also clarify whether it has any policy barring political events such as the one we held yesterday from its premises." Read the full post below:
