Retail tycoon Tang Wee Sung was sentenced to one day in jail and fined S$17,000 (US$11,813) by a Singapore court for trying to buy a kidney and lying about it in a case that has forced lawmakers to rethink a ban on organ trading.
District Court Judge Ng Peng Hong said yesterday he took into consideration Tang’s poor health in sentencing the 56-year-old former head of CK Tang Ltd, one of the city-state’s oldest department store chains.
Tang’s case made front-page news, highlighting the plight of kidney-failure patients in a country where twice as many sufferers join transplant waiting lists as there are organs available.
The trial also sparked debate over the ethics of buying body parts and the feasibility of a regulated market that could circumvent profiteering from the trade.
“The Tang case has provided a platform for Singapore society to consider these matters,” said Eugene Tan, assistant professor of law at Singapore Management University, in an interview yesterday. “This case could provide the avenue for the government to influence public opinion.”
Singapore has the fifth-highest incidence of kidney failure in the world, the National Kidney Foundation said.
Kidney patients wait five to 17 years for a replacement organ, and 84 transplantation candidates were removed from lists last year because they had either died, became too old or too sick for surgery.
Tang’s diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and blood clots worsened his prognosis and precluded him from joining the waiting list, his lawyers said. An attempt to obtain a transplant overseas also failed.
He was removed last Thursday as executive chairman of the company his father created in 1932 after pleading guilty to entering into an illegal, S$300,000 contract to buy a kidney earlier this year. Tang also pleaded guilty to making a false statutory declaration that the donor, an Indonesian, who was to receive 150 million rupiah (US$16,280), was a relative.
The kidney was never transplanted and Tang remains on daily dialysis. Had the deal proceeded, those who helped broker it would have benefited most.
“Criminalizing organ trading does not eliminate it,” Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan told parliament on July 21. “It merely breeds a black market with the middleman creaming off the bulk of the compensation, which the grateful patient is willing to offer.”
Eighty kidneys become available for transplantation in Singapore each year, compared with 200 patients deemed suitable to receive one.
Khaw said he is working to address the deficit, starting with fighting diabetes and expanding organ donations.
Legalizing the payment of donors, a practice outlawed everywhere except Iran, isn’t ruled out.
“By forcing ourselves to think about unconventional approaches, we may be able to find an acceptable way to allow meaningful compensation for some living unrelated kidney donors, without breaching ethical principles and hurting the sensitivities of others,” Khaw told parliament.
Ideally, such a mechanism could defray donors’ costs and needn’t be construed as kidney trading, Khaw told a diabetes meeting in Singapore last month.
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