Jeyaretnam was subsequently brought down by a series of charges which he claimed were politically motivated to remove him from Parliament and prevent him from taking part in future elections.

He was re-elected at the 1984 general election, but subsequently lost his seat in Parliament in 1986 following a conviction for falsely accounting the party's funds ( a conviction Jeyaretnam has always maintained was politically motivated ).

The prosecution appealed, and the Chief Justice ordered a retrial in a different district court rather than an appeal in the Supreme Court ( thus denying Jeyaretnam the opportunity to appeal a revised verdict to the Privy Council of the United Kingdom ).

Since the trial had been held in a district court, Jeyaretnam could not appeal the conviction.

Jeyaretnam was not able to appeal his conviction to the Privy Council, but he exercised his right to appeal the disbarment, and the Privy Council reversed the decision on his disbarment and, when they issued their judgement, severely criticised his conviction by the Singapore court.

In 2001, Jeyaretnam lost his NCMP seat when he was declared bankrupt after failing to keep up with payments for damages owed from a libel suit brought by Goh Chok Tong and other PAP leaders following comments he had made at an election rally in 1997 ( for which he had been ordered to pay S $ 100, 000 plus S $ 20, 000 in court costs ).

These changes came shortly after the Privy Council restored a prominent opposition Member of Parliament, Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam, to the roll of advocates and solicitors of the Supreme Court of Singapore after he had been struck off for a criminal conviction for making false statements in a statutory declaration ; the court described the conviction as " a grievous injustice ".

Jeyaretnam first stood for Parliament in at the 1972 general election, when he contested the Farrer Park constituency and lost to the PAP's Lee Chiaw Meng by 23. 1 % of the vote to 73. 8 % ( with a third candidate taking 3. 1 %).

Two months after his 1984 re-election, Jeyaretnam and WP Chairman Wong Hong Toy were charged for allegedly misreporting his party accounts.

When Jeyaretnam called for an enquiry into the transfer, alleging that the Chief Justice and the Attorney-General were " beholden " to Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, the allegation was dismissed as " scandalous ".

Following this, Lee commenced proceedings for slander against Jeyaretnam, alleging his words at the election rally implied that he had committed a criminal offence by aiding and abetting Teh to commit suicide, and thereby had tried to cover up Teh's corruption.

After the 1997 general election, 11 defamation suits were filed against Jeyaretnam for comments he made at an election rally in support of another of the WP's candidates in Cheng San, lawyer Tang Liang Hong ( who Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong had accused of being a Chinese chauvinist ).

To earn money to pay off his debts, Jeyaretnam sold copies of his book Make it Right for Singapore ( ISBN 9810422261 ), which contained the text of some of his parliamentary speeches from 1997 and 2000.

In 2002, a documentary film on Jeyaretnam entitled A Vision of Persistence was withdrawn from the Singapore International Film Festival for fear that it violated a law banning political films.

On 25 October 2004, Jeyaretnam appealed for an early discharge from bankruptcy so that he could contest in the next general election.

Jeyaretnam was sued slander by Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew for comments he made at a Workers ' Party election rally in 1988.

In 1996, Jeyaretnam was sued for an article he wrote in an issue of The Workers ' Party's newspaper, The Hammer, in which he called the PAP's Indian leaders a bunch of stooges.

In the 2011 general election, the PAP slate for five-member West Coast GRC, comprising Lim Hng Kiang, S. Iswaran, Arthur Fong, Lawrence Wong Shyun Tsai and Foo Mee Har, faced a contest against the Reform Party led by Kenneth Jeyaretnam.

Prominent opposition politicians such as Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam and Chee Soon Juan have also been sued for defamation by government politicians under Singapore's strict libel laws.

On 10 November 1986, the MP for Anson, Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam of the Workers ' Party of Singapore, lost an appeal against a conviction for making a false statement in a declaration and was sentenced to one month's imprisonment and a fine of $ 5, 000.

In 1971, Jeyaretnam led a group of lawyers who took over the opposition Workers ' Party ( WP, which had been founded in 1957 by Singapore's former Chief Minister, David Marshall, but had become a fairly small and insignificant party during the 1960s ), and became the party's Secretary-General.

This was because the law relating to appeals to the Privy Council had been changed after the Privy Council's judgement restoring Jeyaretnam to the roll of advocates and solicitors.

Some critics speculated that Lee Kuan Yew's successor as Prime Minister, Goh Chok Tong, had called the general election in 1991 even though he could have waited another two years in order to prevent Jeyaretnam from standing.

However Goh insisted that he had done so to gain a personal mandate shortly after becoming Prime Minister in 1990, and noted that he planned to hold a by-election in 1992 ( with the aim of bringing new blood into the PAP's parliamentary team ) in which Jeyaretnam would be eligible to stand.

The 1992 by-election was held in the Marine Parade Group Representation Constituency ( in which parties had to field a slate of four candidates ), and was expected to mark the return of Jeyaretnam as a parliamentary candidate.

As only two opposition MPs had been elected, one NCMP seat was offered to Workers ' Party to be taken by a member of their team from Cheng San ( as their team had garnered the highest percentage of the vote of any opposition losing candidates ), and the party selected Jeyaretnam to return to Parliament as its NCMP.

Jeyaretnam had announced at the rally that: " Mr Tang Liang Hong has just placed before me, two reports he has made to the police against, you know, Mr Goh Chok Tong and his people ".

The transfer of party leadership took place in bitter acrimony as Jeyaretnam later accused Low of not doing enough to help him pay the damages from the libel suits ( though Low claimed that he had always looked upon Jeyaretnam as an elder and had done everything possible to help him ).

The film-makers, all lecturers at the Ngee Ann Polytechnic, had claimed that they had just chanced upon Jeyaretnam selling his books on a street and decided to make a documentary on him, unaware at first that he was a major opposition figure.

The official assignee, Sarjit Singh, opposed Jeyaretnam's appeal, claiming that Jeyaretnam had lied about his assets and calling him " the most dishonest bankrupt I have ever come across ".

He said this because Jeyaretnam had not declared a property he had bought in Johor Bahru in Malaysia, worth more than S $ 350, 000.

On 18 June 2008, Jeyaretnam announced that the Registry of Societies had approved the formation of a new political party, the Reform Party, of which he would be the Secretary-General.

A by-election in the Marine Parade Group Representation Constituency in 1992 was expected to mark the return of Jeyaretnam to electoral poltics after his Parliamentary ban had expired.

On 9 December, the Speaker of Parliament made a statement in the House that Jeyaretnam had ceased to be an MP with effect from 10 November by virtue of having been convicted of an offence and sentenced to a fine of not less than $ 2, 000.

On 9 July 1990, the High Court ruled that Jeyaretnam had ceased to be an MP by operation of law and that no separate determination by Parliament had been necessary.

Following the decision of the Privy Council, Jeyaretnam wrote to Singapore President Wee Kim Wee to ask that the convictions be removed as a result of the Privy Council's decision.

He said that if Jeyaretnam was discharged as a bankrupt, it could set a dangerous precedent and the courts could be flooded with similar appeals from bankrupts seeking early discharge.

In 1981, the party's then-leader J. B. Jeyaretnam became the first opposition MP to be elected to Parliament since Singapore's independence in 1965, when he defeated the candidate of the governing People's Action Party ( PAP ) at a by-election in the constituency of Anson.

Though he was no longer in Parliament, Jeyaretnam continued to be The Workers ' Party's Secretary-General.

Chiam was only the second opposition politician ever to be elected to the Republic's Parliament after J. B. Jeyaretnam of the Workers ' Party.

Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam ( 1926 – 2008 ), pictured here in November 2005, was the first Opposition MP to be elected to Parliament since Singapore's independence in 1965

He is the younger son of the late-Singaporean opposition politician, J. B. Jeyaretnam ( who was the first opposition politician to be elected to Parliament in post-independence Singapore ), and Margaret Walker.