Singapore has the Best Paid Ministers In The World!

Forbes.com

Singapore, which prides itself on having one of the world’s most competent bureaucracies, this week gave its top civil servants pay rises of as much as 60%, a hike that would make the world’s most generous private-sector employers blush.

Coming at a time when the income gap between rich and poor in the city-state is widening and ahead of a hike in taxes, the move provoked normally placid Singaporeans into a rare show of public outrage.

Almost 2,000 have signed an online petition against the pay hike and newspapers have been flooded with angry letters. Mild perhaps by international standards, it has nonetheless been an unusually strong public outcry in a place where rallies are banned without a permit and there is no political opposition.

Under the pay hike plan, the annual salary of the chief executive of Singapore Inc., Prime Minister Lee, will rise to 3.1 million Singapore dollars ($2 million), up from S$2.5 million now ($1.65 million), roughly five times the pay of U.S. President George W. Bush.

Lee will rank as the 102 nd-biggest earner in the city-state of about 4.5 million people under the new salary scheme, up from 164th before, but still lower than his No. 63 ranking in 2000.

But the biggest pay increase will go to entry-level ministerial officials, who will receive an annual salary of S$1.9 million ($1.25 million) by next year, up from S$1.2 million ($790,000) now.

In 1994, Singapore’s founding prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, created a system that pegged the salaries of top civil servants to what they might earn in the private sector.

Lee, who is the father of the current prime minister, decided that ministers would earn two-thirds of the median of the top 48 earners in six professions: lawyers, accountants, bankers, engineers and the top employees in multinational corporations and local manufacturers.

Latest news has it the their PM will give his increment portion to charity, I wonder which one - NKF?

A blogger's take on this issue