LI Hongyi, the son of Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, today declared on Facebook that he has no interest in politics.

“For what it is worth, I really have no interest in politics,” he said in a brief but telling post.

Hongyi’s post comes a day after his uncle, Lee Hsien Yang and his aunt, Dr Lee Wei Ling accused his father, Hsien Loong, of harbouring political ambitions for Hongyi so as to build a “Lee dynasty”.

The prime minister has denied the claims as “absurd”.  

“I am deeply saddened by the unfortunate allegations that they have made. Ho Ching and I deny these allegations, especially the absurd claim that I have political ambitions for my son,” said the prime minister, speaking for his second wife and Hongyi’s mother.

Hongyi, 30, is the deputy director of the Government Digital Services Data Science Division of the Government Technology Agency of Singapore, a statutory board under the Prime Minister’s Office.

In 2006, he won the Lee Kuan Yew Award for Mathematics and Science and received a Public Service Commission Overseas Merit Scholarship to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States.

Hsien Yang and Wei Ling had published a six-page statement on Facebook early yesterday morning, in which they accused their brother of power abuse and expressed fears of being persecuted by the prime minister using “organs of state”. Hsien Yang also claimed he had no choice but to flee his home country due to fears the prime minister was monitoring him.

Following the outcry on social media, where most Singaporeans appeared to take the prime minister’s side, Wei Ling this morning made another statement saying the feud was more than “merely a family affair.”

She suggested that her brother, the Singapore prime minister, was capable of also “misusing his official power” against other citizens.

Wei Ling claimed she would not have made a public statement if her quarrel with the prime minister had been just a family spat.

“The most important point I want to put across is if PM can misuse his official power to abuse his siblings who can fight back, what else can he do to ordinary citizens,” she said.

The three children of SIngapore’s founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew have also been long involved in a tussle over the fate of the family home at 38, Oxley Road.

Kuan Yew had expressed his wish for the house to be demolished upon his death, which occurred in 2015. – June 14, 2017.