Singapore’s stock exchange is struggling with a rash of delistings and governance scandals that threaten its ambition to replace Hong Kong as a regional finance hub.
SGX has long been one of Asia’s top exchanges, attracting companies to list in one of the region’s only developed financial centres. But years of delistings outnumbering new joiners have taken their toll, together with a series of corporate failures and the loss of critical trading business to rivals. Some bearish analysts see it as an existential crisis.
“It’s really the death of the stock exchange,” said Arnaud Vagner, who exposed the accounting problems that led to the delisting and near-collapse of Singapore-listed commodities trading house Noble Group in 2018. Mr Vagner writes under the name Iceberg Research.