Rep. Singson transferred to Tung Tao jail in HK

Resigned Ilocos Sur Rep. Ronald Singson has been transferred to the Tung Tao Correctional Institution – a minimum security facility located in a tourist destination town in Kong Kong, where the lawmaker would be detained for the next 18 months. GMA News stringer Azon Cañete said Singson, sentenced by a Hong Kong court for drug trafficking, was brought to the facility from the Lai Chi Kok Prison, where he was detained for the last 40 days. Singson was arrested in July 2010 after being caught at the Chek Lap Kok International Airport carrying cocaine and two tablets of diazepam or Valium. A thirty-minute drive away from the city proper, the detention facility is located in Stanley town, which is on a peninsula that is a famous tourist destination southeast of Hong Kong Island. Inmates are barred from receiving visitors, who likewise are not allowed to send food to their jailed loved ones. Despite the tight security, inmates are free to get some exercise or make use of the library in the facility that could accommodate 500 prisoners, according to the Hong Kong Correctional Services. Fr. Emilio Lim, the chaplain for Filipino migrants in Hong Kong, who also gives counsel to detained Filipinos there, assured the public that the Ilocos Sur lawmaker was not being treated differently from other prisoners. "Fair lahat ng pagturing sa inmates dito. Walang special treatment because of your status in society," he told GMA News. Lim added: "If given a chance and as far as I know he is a Catholic and he has faith... If I have the chance to visit him, I would be wiling to go and visit him." Singson was on his second three-year term in Congress after his re-election in the May 2010 polls, when he brushed with Hong Kong authorities. Last February 28, for days after his conviction, Singson sent his resignation letter to House Speaker Feliciano Belmote, who dropped the lawmaker from the rolls on March 7. Ronald is the son of Ilocos Sur Gov. Luis "Chavit" Singson, who grabbed the media spotlight for his exposé that former President Joseph Estrada received protection money from an illegal numbers game of jueteng. The controversy had led to Estrada's ouster in 2001. The younger Singson became the second lawmaker in the history of the House of Representatives to resign after being convicted of a crime. In August 1990, then Nueva Ecija Rep. Nicanor de Guzman Jr. tendered his resignation after he was convicted of gun smuggling by a Pasay City court. — LBG, GMA News