Will MAS ever say this?

Martin Wheatley, the outgoing head of Hong Kong’s securities market regulator, said today that sponsors’ due diligence of initial public offerings has been “inadequate” at times.

“In many cases, sponsors are spread too thinly in terms of the number of deals they’re bringing to the market at any one time”.

Hong Kong’s regulator may make sponsors of IPOs in the city liable for statements in their clients’ prospectuses to prevent fraud of locally listed Chinese companies.

Bloomberg story

Never ever heard any MAS official say there was anything wrong with sponsors’ due diligence despite some new listcos coming out with profit warnings shortly after being listed.

I’ve been told that MAS does not inspect sponsors to ensure that they are following “best practices”.  It is left to SGX. A few years ago, a then prominent IPO sponsor was “suspended” from bringing new listings to market.

The HK proposal to make sponsors of IPOs in the city liable for statements in their clients’ prospectuses is a gd one, and should be adopted to prevent fraud in listing S-Chips.

What S’pore and Ireland have in common?

No not because S’pore is heading for insolvency etc if Tan Kin Lian is to believed http://tankinlian.blogspot.com/2010/11/will-singapore-face-same-outcome-as.html

We and the Irish are dependent on MNCs.

Mr Honohan [the Irish Central Bank governor] … points out that Ireland’s official GDP and unit labour cost statistics have consisently overstated the size of the Irish economy and its productivity respectively – largely because that economy is so dependent on multinationals with headquarters in the Republic, whose high profits acrrue to the overseas owners of those multinationals rather than to Irish residents.

That overstatement of the magnitude of the output of Irish residents, which in some real sense is attributable to those residents, could be as much as quarter, he says. Excerpt from Robert Preston’s blog on BBC Online.

Here, where the economy too is dependent on MNCs, this means that the economy is not as big as the stats imply. And that productivity is even worse than the already lousy numbers show*. The latter isn’t juz Reform Party spin. Remember there is yet another government campaign to raise productivity going on.

Perhaps the fact that the economy is smaller than the stats imply  is why the government seems obsessed by the need to build up the reserves. We will (not might) need the rainy-day money, one day. Question of “when” not “if”.

What abt High Notes SM Goh?

The central bank has given DBS Bank an unprecedented public censure and instructed the 27%-owned Temasek bank to put aside S$230m  to cover its operational risks. Gd for MAS, and SM Goh (chairman of MAS), Tharman and Hng Kiang. The last two ministers also  sit on MAS’ board.

There is another thing to be put right, SM, Tharman and Hng Kiang.

DBS’ Hong Kong unit recently agreed to pay out HK$651 million or about S$115 million to some clients who bought products linked to Lehman Brothers. As HK$1.3 billion of notes were sold, the compensation received works out to 49% of amount invested.

In S’pore, it sold a similar product, HN5 Notes. DBS issued, arranged and distributed HN5. A total of S$103.7 million worth of HN5 were sold to 1,083 retail clients between 30 March and 30 April 2007, according to a July 2009 MAS report.

The same report said DBS compensated investors S$7.8 million.

What this works out to is 7.5% of amount investments versus 49% in HK. Is this fair? Product is the same.

Force DBS to treat the S’porean investors fairly,  ministers. You have the moral authority.

If you do, I’m sure the compensated HN5 investors, family and friends will remember the good deed when the GE comes. It’s “win, win” except for DBS. And even then its a peanutty S$51m, 44% of amount paid to the HongKies.

BTW I did not buy any of the credit-linked notes that failed. Not that “greedy”.

Related post

http://atans1.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/dbs-another-case-of-discrimination-against-locals/