THE National Kidney Foundation falsely inflated the number of patients it treats and understated how long its financial reserves would last, its chief executive Mr T.T. Durai conceded yesterday.
Mr Durai admitted in court that if NKF's reserves of $262 million were used simply to treat dialysis patients, they would last 30 to 40 years, not three years, as the foundation has long claimed. He also admitted that the NKF had made 'a few errors' over the years in telling the public how many patients it treats.
But he denied that there was a deliberate strategy to mislead the public, saying that he and his colleagues 'honestly believed' they should raise as much money as they could for the 'patients of the future'.
In May last year, Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan informed Parliament that the NKF had treated 1,414 patients in 1999 and 1,512 patients in 2003.
The previous month, the NKF had told The Straits Times that it needed about $2,600 a month to support each of its 2,000 patients, a total of $62.4 million per year.
The charity cited those figures to bolster its argument that its reserves were not excessive. Based on its expenditure of more than $60 million a year for dialysis, the reserves would last three years, it said.
But yesterday, during the defamation case NKF had launched against Singapore Press Holdings, the court was shown how the NKF in fact spent far less on dialysis than the public had been led to believe.
According to its 2003 audited financial statement, it spent $31.6 million that year on dialysis and transplantation. Of that amount, $22.9 million came from dialysis fees it collected from patients and a further $1.5 million came from other related income.
So NKF was out of pocket by only $7.2 million, noted Mr Davinder Singh, who was acting for SPH.He asked Mr Durai: 'If you stopped all fundraising activities and concentrated purely on treating kidney patients, the NKF can continue for at least another 30 years without raising a single cent. True or false?'
Mr Durai initially disagreed, saying that no one could be sure patients would continue to pay their share for the treatments. But he finally agreed that NKF's assertion that the reserves would last only three years was 'not accurate'.
'It is not accurate; in other words, it is false?' asked Mr Singh.
'Yes,' said Mr Durai.
He told the court that this impression had never been corrected.
'We always took the point that if the patients do not pay the moneys for dialysis, the reserves would last only for three years. That is the way we answered the public,' he said.
But Mr Singh noted that even if the NKF had to foot the entire dialysis bill of $31.6 million a year, its current reserves of $262 million would last more than eight years.
He suggested that there was a 'conspiracy', a 'deliberate strategy' to create a false impression of need so that NKF would get more money, a suggestion Mr Durai rejected.
Mr Durai also denied that his performance bonus was linked to the amount of donations NKF received.
Mr Singh then asked him why he would not come clean on the matter.
'The money is for the people,' said Mr Durai.
'And your taps,' retorted Mr Singh.
NKF had sued SPH over an article written by senior correspondent Susan Long, which recounted an incident in which expensive fittings, including taps, had been installed in the bathroom of Mr Durai's private office suite.
On the question of how many patients the NKF actually treats, Mr Singh noted that the organisation's estimates had changed over time.
A letter written to The Straits Times in April last year by the chairman of its Children's Medical Fund board, Dr Gerard Chuah, had claimed that the NKF had 3,000 patients.
Mr Singh pointed out the number had been overstated by about 1,000.
Mr Durai said he realised there was a mistake only after the letter had been published, but had not corrected it.
Mr Singh asked: 'So in addition to the travel and the reserves, we now know that even the number of patients that were being put out as being treated by NKF was erroneous and remains uncorrected; right?'
'Yes,' Mr Durai replied.
When asked why he had done nothing to correct it, he said: 'It was an oversight. I did not think it was of material importance. The donor gives us money because of the brand of the NKF and I did not think it was so important at that point of time to correct this error.'
Mr Singh suggested that the number had been inflated to create a false impression of need. In fact, according to Mr Khaw's reply to Parliament last year, NKF's 'share' of kidney patients in Singapore had dropped, from 54 per cent in 1999 to 44 in 2003.
Mr Durai maintained that NKF had not deliberately set out to create a false impression to attract more funds. He also disagreed that the failure of the NKF management to correct the errors amounted to mismanagement.
'Whatever we did was to grow the programmes,' he said. 'We did it not with deliberateness to deceive anyone at all.'
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