SINGAPORE, April 9: Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong will earn five times more than US President George Bush this year after a pay raise on Monday boosted his annual salary to $2.1 million.

A minister told parliament on Monday that other Singapore government ministers, who are already among the best paid in the world, will also see their salaries jump by about 60 per cent to an average of $1.26 million.

“For the public service to remain an attractive employer, our terms must keep pace with the private sector,” Defence Minister Teo Chee Hean, who is also minister in charge of the civil service, said in parliament.

The ministerial salary increase is slightly smaller than the government had originally proposed.

Lee said last month the salaries of ministers and top civil servants might have to rise by as much as $660,000 to $1.45 million because they had fallen way below benchmark top salaries in the private sector.

Lee’s announcement sparked an outcry, with hundreds of Singaporeans signing an online petition and writing to newspapers to protest against the move.

Some Singaporeans said the ministerial salaries did not reflect the country’s economy or the government’s performance, adding that the government was tactless to raise ministers’ salaries now given Singapore’s widening income gap.

One regional politician questioned the size of the increase.

“From the announcement today, I sense that it is a bit too high,” said Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia’s former deputy prime minister-turned-dissident, at a Foreign Correspondents’ Association dinner in Singapore.

Anwar said that politicians needed to be paid reasonably well but that salaries should not be “blatantly high, unreasonably high” as this could erode the sense of public service.—Reuters