Toughen up the rules: Singapore investors

This amidst the delisting or suspension of more than one in ten Chinese firms listed in Singapore since 2008, yet executives are safe back home.

A Bloomberg report said, “Regulators must seek a balance between the need for investor protection and a desire to attract companies to Singapore’s exchange. Lawyers said executives of Chinese firms that trade in Singapore, so-called S-chips, are beyond the reach of current law as long as they remain in China.”

Singapore’s former attorney general, Walter Woon, who heads the steering committee overseeing proposed changes to the Companies Act, was quoted as saying, “Even if there’s a flagrant, blatant breach of our laws, we can’t touch the guy because certain sections of our Companies Act don’t apply to foreign entities.”

Woon commented we should at least consider making some of the basic rules on corporate governance apply to foreign companies that want to list here, even if this scares away some people.

According to the report, the Singapore, New York, London and Tokyo exchanges were given permission to open offices in China in 2007 to lure companies from the world’s most populous nation seeking to tap international capital markets.

View the full report here.