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SINGAPORE \u2013 Kenneth Jeyaretnam, secretary-general of the Reform Party, died on July 18. He was 67.<\/p>\n
His death was announced by his wife, Amanda Jeyaretnam, in a Facebook post on the afternoon of July 19. She said Jeyaretnam \u201cdied peacefully in his sleep surrounded by family\u201d.<\/p>\n
She said funeral details for a small family service are still being finalised, and that a memorial to celebrate his life will be arranged at a later date.<\/p>\n
\u201cThank you for your love and support and to everyone who managed to visit him in the hospital, please know it meant a lot to him,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Jeyaretnam is the elder son of the late opposition MP\u00a0J.B. Jeyaretnam \u2013 popularly known as JBJ \u2013 who was the first opposition politician elected into the Singapore Parliament after independence in 1965, and established the Reform Party in 2008.<\/p>\n
Jeyaretnam studied at the United World College of South-East Asia, and Charterhouse School in England. In 1983, he graduated from the University of Cambridge with a Double First Class Honours in Economics.<\/p>\n
He went on to pursue a career in the financial sector, starting out as a credit analyst at Wardley, the merchant banking subsidiary of HSBC, before moving to Continental Bank, Banque Indosuez, Lehman Brothers, and Nomura International.<\/p>\n
After his father\u2019s passing in September 2008, Jeyaretnam took over to helm the Reform Party from April 2009.<\/p>\n
He stood in three General Elections, as part of RP\u2019s slate that contested West Coast GRC in 2011 and 2015, and Ang Mo Kio \u2013 against then-Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong\u2019s team \u2013 in 2020. RP was unsuccessful each time.<\/p>\n
He also contested in a by-election in 2013, after PAP MP Michael Palmer resigned from the PAP and gave up his parliamentary seat in Punggol East SMC over an extramarital affair. Jeyaretnam and Singapore Democratic Alliance\u2019s Desmond Lim netted less than 2 per cent of the vote combined, which saw Workers\u2019 Party candidate Lee Li Lian win a four-cornered fight that also included PAP\u2019s Koh Poh Koon.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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SINGAPORE \u2013 Kenneth Jeyaretnam, secretary-general of the Reform Party, died on July 18. He was 67. His death was announced by his wife, Amanda Jeyaretnam,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":69972,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2611],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-buzz-headlines","wpcat-2611-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=69971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69971\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/69972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=69971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=69971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=69971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}