Financial institutions in Singapore are scouring client records after police raided a sprawling criminal organization with stockpiles of cash—and dozens of bank accounts, the Wall Street Journal reported. Police officers and agents in the city-state arrested 10 foreign nationals in mid-August on charges including fraud and money laundering. The arrests followed a series of raids that led to the discovery of $630 million worth of properties, cars, luxury goods and cash, and $81 million of assets held across 35 bank accounts.
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Some of the biggest local and international banks in Singapore are becoming embroiled in one of the city-state’s largest money laundering cases involving more than S$1 billion ($740 million) of assets, Bloomberg News reported. In charge sheets seen by Bloomberg News, some of the individuals who were arrested and charged this month held funds totaling millions — from unlicensed moneylending in China and illegal gambling — in United Overseas Bank Ltd. and the local units of Citigroup Inc. and RHB Bank Bhd.
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A Singapore judge handed a 12-month prison term to a businessman for conspiring to misappropriate money in the Wirecard AG scandal, Bloomberg News reported. Henry Yeo, a director at Jacobson Fareast Marketing Services Pte, was convicted after pleading guilty to three charges in a Singapore state court on Tuesday. “Wirecard Asia suffered a total loss of S$123,070 ($91,072) as a result of the accused’s participation in the conspiracy to dishonestly misappropriate money from its account,” deputy public prosecutor Vincent Ong said in court.
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Singapore’s financial regulator imposed penalties amounting to a total of S$3.8 million ($2.8 million) on four financial institutions for breaches related to the Wirecard AG scandal, Bloomberg News reported. DBS Group Holdings Ltd., Citigroup Inc., Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. and Swiss Life Holding AG were found to have inadequate money laundering and terrorism financing controls in place when they dealt with parties linked to Wirecard, the Monetary Authority of Singapore said in a statement on Wednesday.
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Singapore plans to more aggressively regulate electricity markets as price jumps intensify, again threatening to hurt the retailers that sell it to businesses and households, Bloomberg News reported. The Energy Market Authority will cap wholesale power prices from July 1 using a formula tied to natural gas and generation costs, it said in a document on its website. That comes after they jumped as much as 3,000% this year despite sharp drops in the cost of liquefied natural gas, the nation’s main fuel.
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The Monetary Authority of Singapore on Friday imposed additional capital requirement on DBS Bank, the banking arm of the country's largest lender DBS Group, following the disruption of its banking services in recent months, Reuters reported. The moves follows the widespread unavailability of the bank's digital banking services on March 29 and a subsequent disruption to its digital banking and ATM services on May 5, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) said in a statement.
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Vera Liu, a Singapore property agent, was panicking in the wee hours of Thursday morning after new property taxes saw two of her deals fall through, Reuters reported. Singapore raised levies on private property purchases in a surprise move late on Wednesday night to cool the market, including a doubling of stamp duties for foreigners to an eye-watering 60%.
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Potential buyers are inquiring about purchasing the struggling crypto lender Hodlnaut and its claims against bankrupt digital-asset exchange FTX, Bloomberg News reported. “Various parties who are interested in acquiring” Singapore-based Hodlnaut’s crypto platform and FTX claims have contacted the interim judicial managers overseeing the company after it sought protection from creditors, according to an affidavit seen by Bloomberg News. The judicial managers are in the process of signing non-disclosure agreements with the potential investors, the document shows.
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The co-founders of failed cryptocurrency hedge fund Three Arrows Capital are now courting investors for a new venture that looks to capitalize on a growing list of bankruptcies in the space, CNBC.com reported. Kyle Davies and Su Zhu are listed as founding members in a pitch deck obtained by CNBC for a distressed debt marketplace called GTX. Davies and Zhu founded Three Arrows Capital, a once $10 billion Singapore-based hedge fund that filed for bankruptcy in July.
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Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange by trading volume, is making a new public effort to show it's taking compliance in the crypto market seriously, YahooFinance.com reported. On Friday, the company announced it will join the Association of Certified Sanctions Specialists (ACSS) to enhance the expertise of its international compliance team.
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