I refer to the letter Extravagance and Mrs Lee Kuan Yew . Much had been said in various letters to the editor on how the Minister Mentor of Singapore had his way in flying his stroke-stricken wife back from London via a Singapore Airlines commercial flight.

This was then compared to the recent purchase of an A319 jet by the Malaysian government despite the many aircrafts already owned by the government such as a Bombardier Global Express, a Falcon 900 Executive Jet, a Boeing Business Jet and a Fokker F-28 Fellowship which are amongst some of the largest and most expensive executive jets available today.

First of all, let me clarify that through all my reading of news reports, SIA only converted the First and Business classes of one of their Boeing 747s into a 'flying hospital' for Lee's wife. The rest of that commercial flight was unaffected. In fact, no one knew that the VIP couple was on board.

The only people whom might have had a slight hint of it were probably the unfortunate First and Business class passengers who were subsequently offloaded onto other flights. Secondly, almost immediately after the event, the Senior Minister Office's clarified that Senior Minister (then) Lee had paid for the cost of flying Mrs Lee back to Singapore.

Such use of commercial flights by top Malaysian politicians is virtually unheard of because of the numerous big jets at their disposal. Even the Queen of England uses a chartered British Airways jet and Tony Blair normally uses regular British Airways flights.

I certainly do not want to see our top government servants to use jalopies, stay in ramshackle huts and fly 'cattle class' but certainly their extravagances go unchecked these days.