Singapore’s central bank has banned some of the city-state’s biggest financial institutions from selling structured notes after they improperly marketed US$367 million of the bonds that were linked to Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
The 10 banks and brokerages can’t sell structured notes for between six months and two years, the Monetary Authority of Singapore said in a statement late on Tuesday.
The 10 banned financial institutions are: DBS Group, UOB Kay Hian, OCBC Securities, ABN AMRO’s Singapore branch, Maybank Singapore, CIMB-GK Securities, Hong Leong Finance, DMG Partners, Phillip Securities and Kim Eng Securities.
The central bank said some of the institutions assigned risk ratings that were inconsistent with warnings stated in the prospectus for the notes, and salespeople were ill trained to sell the notes.
The Lehman collapse last fall led to a default on the dividend payment of some of the bonds, most of which had a maturity of five to seven years and a yield of about 5 percent.
About 10,000 investors bought S$520 million (US$367 million) of the notes, and financial institutions have compensated about 4,000 of them, the central bank said.
Similar structured notes were sold in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Indonesia.
CASINO DELAYED
Meanwhile, the opening of Singapore’s first casino has been put back several months because of shortages of labor and materials, the chairman of developer Las Vegas Sands said yesterday.
Sheldon Adelson said Marina Bay Sands would open early next year for its initial phase, after being originally due to welcome its first visitors by the end of this year.
“The opening date we seriously anticipate will be in January or February,” Adelson said at a ceremony marking the finishing of construction of the development’s three 55-story hotel towers.
“We can’t control the flow of sand to make concrete with, we can’t control the availability of steel ... and we can’t control the availability of labor due to other projects that are in the market,” he said.
Adelson yesterday put the total cost of the development at S$8 billion.
Super Typhoon Kong-rey is the largest cyclone to impact Taiwan in 27 years, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said today. Kong-rey’s radius of maximum wind (RMW) — the distance between the center of a cyclone and its band of strongest winds — has expanded to 320km, CWA forecaster Chang Chun-yao (張竣堯) said. The last time a typhoon of comparable strength with an RMW larger than 300km made landfall in Taiwan was Typhoon Herb in 1996, he said. Herb made landfall between Keelung and Suao (蘇澳) in Yilan County with an RMW of 350km, Chang said. The weather station in Alishan (阿里山) recorded 1.09m of
NO WORK, CLASS: President William Lai urged people in the eastern, southern and northern parts of the country to be on alert, with Typhoon Kong-rey approaching Typhoon Kong-rey is expected to make landfall on Taiwan’s east coast today, with work and classes canceled nationwide. Packing gusts of nearly 300kph, the storm yesterday intensified into a typhoon and was expected to gain even more strength before hitting Taitung County, the US Navy’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center said. The storm is forecast to cross Taiwan’s south, enter the Taiwan Strait and head toward China, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The CWA labeled the storm a “strong typhoon,” the most powerful on its scale. Up to 1.2m of rainfall was expected in mountainous areas of eastern Taiwan and destructive winds are likely
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday at 5:30pm issued a sea warning for Typhoon Kong-rey as the storm drew closer to the east coast. As of 8pm yesterday, the storm was 670km southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻) and traveling northwest at 12kph to 16kph. It was packing maximum sustained winds of 162kph and gusts of up to 198kph, the CWA said. A land warning might be issued this morning for the storm, which is expected to have the strongest impact on Taiwan from tonight to early Friday morning, the agency said. Orchid Island (Lanyu, 蘭嶼) and Green Island (綠島) canceled classes and work
KONG-REY: A woman was killed in a vehicle hit by a tree, while 205 people were injured as the storm moved across the nation and entered the Taiwan Strait Typhoon Kong-rey slammed into Taiwan yesterday as one of the biggest storms to hit the nation in decades, whipping up 10m waves, triggering floods and claiming at least one life. Kong-rey made landfall in Taitung County’s Chenggong Township (成功) at 1:40pm, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The typhoon — the first in Taiwan’s history to make landfall after mid-October — was moving north-northwest at 21kph when it hit land, CWA data showed. The fast-moving storm was packing maximum sustained winds of 184kph, with gusts of up to 227kph, CWA data showed. It was the same strength as Typhoon Gaemi, which was the most
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