Daily Briefing: Singapore and Malaysia suspend permanent restrictions over Pasir Gudang and Seletar Airport; Shell fined $400,000 for Pulau Bukom fire

And Go-Jek Singapore poaches HSBC’s PayMe creator Adam D’Arcy as its chief product officer.

From Yahoo! News Singapore:

Malaysia will immediately suspend its permanent restricted area in the airspace over Pasir Gudang whilst Singapore will suspend the implementation of its Instrument Landing System (ILS) procedures for Seletar Airport as part of its efforts to preserve its relationship following aviation and maritime disputes.

Singapore’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Dr Vivian Balakrishnan and his Malaysian counterpart Saifuddin Abdullah and their respective delegations met in Singapore to discuss the aviation and maritime issues surrounding the Johor Bahru and Singapore port limits.

On the maritime issues, both Ministers agreed to establish a working group headed by the Permanent Secretary of the Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Chee Wee Kiong, and the Secretary-General of the Malaysian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Muhammad Shahrul Ikram Yaakob, and comprising senior officials.

The working group will study and discuss the legal and operational matters in order to de-escalate the situation on the ground, and report to the Foreign Ministers within two months.

Read more here.

From Channel News Asia:

Oil firm Shell has been fined $400,000 for a fire that broke out at a petroleum refinery on Pulau Bukom in 2015 which injured six workers including two suffering from 50% and 70% burns.

On 21 August 2015, two groups of workers were simultaneously conducting maintenance and project works on a crude distillation unit at the refinery.

"When one of the workers opened the valve to start the draining process, flammable vapours from the draining of hydrocarbons came into contact with the sparks from the hot works," the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) said.

The fire broke out despite the worker immediately closing the valve after he was alerted, MOM said. "Investigations revealed that there was a systemic failure in Shell’s oversight to check for compatibility of different work activities carried out within the same vicinity at the same time," it said.

Read more here.

From eFinancial Careers:

Grab rival Go-Jek which has been operating in Singapore since November 2018 has poached HSBC’s Adam D’Arcy as its new chief product officer for its lending network Mapan that it acquired in December 2017.

D’Arcy joined HSBC in January 2016 in Hong Kong and has spent the last 18 months primarily focused on developing the bank’s successful peer-to-peer payments service PayMe as its chief product officer, according to his online profile. His departure comes as a blow to the bank as the app now boasts more than one million active users in Hong Kong and D'arcy describes himself as its “creator”.

Go-Jek’s office in Shenton Way focuses on high-end specialist jobs in data science and engineering. It currently has six local vacancies, all in engineering, including an applied researcher in deep learning. Most of its tech staff are employed in Jakarta, Bangalore and Thailand, where labour costs are much lower than in Singapore.

Go-Jek is far from the only large tech company that has raided the finance sector of late. Banks in Singapore have faced increased competition for talent from Asian unicorns and US tech firms over the past 12 months.

Read more here.