TWO former senior employees of UOB Kay Hian Private Limited (UOBKH) were charged on Wednesday for allegedly lying to the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) in relation to reports on a then Catalist aspirant. Lan Kang Ming, 38, and Wee Toon Lee, 34, each face three charges of providing MAS with false information in October 2018 in relation to due diligence reports on an unidentified company applying to list on the Catalist board of the Singapore Exchange. MAS said in a media statement on Wednesday that it was performing an onsite inspection of UOBKH between June and August 2018, to assess the latter's controls, policies and procedures in relation to its role as an issue manager for Initial Public Offering (IPOs). During the examination, Lan and Wee were said to have provided different versions of a due diligence report relating to background checks on a company applying to be listed on the Catalist board of the Singapore Exchange. UOBKH had acted as the issue manager
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By LINETTE LIM
16 February 2011
Rising inflation, interest rate hikes and the risk of Egyptian contagion - coupled with better economic data coming out of the US - are threatening to put a dampener on emerging markets.
However, Citi Asia Pacific’s head of markets Rodrigo Zorrilla believes that the recent outflows from emerging market funds to the developed world to be a temporary ‘rebalancing of risk and portfolio’, rather than a long-term trend.
According to Mr. Zorrilla, market activity in Asia supports this view.
Asia Pacific and Asia ex-Japan G3 bond issuance in January totalled US$40 billion, an increase of 25 per cent from last year. This is on top of the fact that 2010 was a record year for the issuance of Asian fixed income securities.
Mr. Zorrilla - who will be speaking at Citi’s Asia Pacific Investor Conference today - said that since the annual investor conference’s launch eight years ago, Asian offshore bond issuance has doubled to over US$100 billion.
Asian local bond issuance - which was virtually non-existent before the crisis - is now too, in excess of US$100 billion.
In terms of mergers and acquisitions, Asian outbound M&A activity hit a new high of US$126.1 billion last year. Of this, some US$70 billion came from Chinese companies.
‘In many cases, large scale funding on these M&A transactions is provided by local liquidity,’ said Mr. Zorrilla.
‘We think that liquidity will continue to reside within Asia for some time given the long-term growth potential of the region.’
He also noted that Asian companies were making acquisitions in developed economies as well as emerging ones in Latin America and Africa.
For equities, Citi expects another year of healthy issuances, due to a ‘busy pipeline for IPOs across the region’.
The investment house believes that ‘Asia will remain the engine of growth for the world’. Mr. Zorrilla said that this status quo would be under threat ‘if the US dollar really strengthens a lot’ or if there is a ‘more substantial’ increase in inflation - none of which seems likely right now, he noted.