Tuesday, October 06, 2020

Beijing’s attack on HSBC is a blow to Hongkongers, but all is not lost

In addition to regulatory hurdles and, more recently, the pandemic, HSBC has been caught up in the US-China tussle. 

Rumours that the bank may be placed on China’s ‘unreliable entity list’ have done the bank’s stock and its many local investors no favours

HSBC can turn the tide by moving its headquarters to Hong Kong, shaving off non-performing assets and focusing on Asia-Pacific



Albert Cheng Published: 2 Oct, 2020

Hongkongers wait for a tram in front of a HSBC advertisement in Central on September 28. Photo: Nora Tam

HSBC shares have plunged to a record low, falling below the HK$28 per share price during its rights issue during the global financial crisis. While shareholders grieve, for many Hongkongers, the stock’s recent decline indicates the end of the Hong Kong-bred bank’s heydey.

Both the global and local political climate have played a role in HSBC’s downfall. After the 2008 financial crisis, HSBC, which once went global with the vision of being “the world’s local bank”, met its Waterloo in the United States and Europe.

Following the Covid-19 outbreak in March, the US and European Union have tried to boost their economies with monetary easing. The  zero-to-negative interest rate policy has severely hurt the profits of the banking sector.

In addition, after moving its headquarters to London, HSBC has had to adhere to the Bank of England’s policies. To offset the financial burden caused by the rapid increase of non-performing loans, banks must retain capital. The Bank of England’s instruction to British financial institutions to suspend dividend payments has put HSBC’s stock price under pressure.

Since the financial crises and the September 11 attacks, Western countries have tightened regulation of the banking sector. HSBC had to separate its investment and retail banking businesses, and also paid billions of dollars to the US regulators to settle money laundering and tax evasion cases.


HSBC sees second-quarter profits plunge by 82 per cent thanks to coronavirus

Today, Hong Kong is caught in the middle of escalating US-China tensions. Given that HSBC is an iconic symbol of Hong Kong as an international financial centre, the bank was unlikely to remain unscathed.

Not only has it been criticised in the West for its dealings with Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou, in an effort to counter US sanctions, a report in China’s Global Times cited a government source saying HSBC could be listed on an “unreliable entity” list. These developments have done HSBC’s stock no favours.

Huawei to double down on HSBC as Meng Wanzhou’s legal battle intensifies
29 Jul 2020


HSBC has been one of Hong Kong’s most successful brands. It has witnessed Hong Kong’s ups and downs over more than 150 years. Hongkongers are not only proud of HSBC, they are also the biggest contributors to its profits.

HSBC, and its subsidiary Hang Seng Bank, account for the largest number of depositors in Hong Kong. Individuals, companies, charities and Mandatory Provident Fund investment managers have long held HSBC stock for the stable dividends. Many Hongkongers invest their life savings in HSBC stock as part of their retirement plan. Some believe holding tens of thousands of HSBC shares is equivalent to owning a property or a
taxi licence.

In fact, HSBC has an employee share purchase plan, under which the bank matches one share for every three shares an employee holds . It was initially beneficial to employees, which is why thousands of employees have joined the scheme. However, as the company’s stock plummets, employees have suffered losses, impacting morale.

HSBC, as a long-standing Hong Kong brand, in a way, belongs to Hongkongers. However, instead of protecting the bank, Beijing has deliberately spread rumours it could be listed as an unreliable entity. This is extremely damaging not only to the company but also the interests of the general public and various organisations in Hong Kong.

Even more disturbing, Ping An Insurance
has been absorbing HSBC shares during the period, upping its stake in the bank to an 8 per cent shareholding. Although HSBC stock may still drop further, Ping An’s investment could signal to investors that HSBC stock is still desirable, as are Hong Kong’s prospects.

It is not impossible for HSBC to turn the tide. All it has to do is to get rid of the non-performing assets and businesses, and resume paying dividends. HSBC should
move its headquarters back to Hong Kong and focus on the more profitable Asia-Pacific markets, so that it is no longer bound by EU restrictions.

In the face of adversity, Hong Kong and HSBC share the same destiny; as long as one stays hopeful, every day is a new day.


Albert Cheng King-hon is a political commentator

Albert Cheng
 is the founder of Digital Broadcasting Corporation Hong Kong Limited, a current affairs commentator and columnist. He was formerly a direct elected Hong Kong SAR legislative councillor. Mr Cheng was voted by Time Magazine in 1997 as one of "the 25 most influential people in new Hong Kong" and selected by Business Week in 1998 as one of "the 50 stars of Asia".
In the Philippines, ABS-CBN network shut by Duterte faces uncertain future

Eugenio Lopez has walked away from the station and the family business empire, seemingly relenting in his battle with the country’s president

Lopez was the latest in a line of tycoons in the Philippines to run afoul of Duterte, who made bringing down ‘oligarchs’ one of his campaign promises


Raissa Robles
Published: 3 Oct, 2020

Writers and editors of ABS-CBN in the newsroom at their Manila headquarters following orders by the telecoms regulator to cease operations. Photo: Reuters

Eugenio “Gabby” Lopez III’s September 24 resignation as chairman emeritus of ABS-CBN, with the Philippines’ biggest broadcast network now on the verge of collapse, is seen as a lesson in what happens to tycoons who cross paths with President Rodrigo Duterte.

ABS-CBN’s 25-year broadcast licence lapsed in May, and two months later pro-Duterte lawmakers blocked the issuance of a new one – fulfilling a threat the president had made two years ago.

At the end of last year, the network had a 42 per cent share of viewers nationwide – outstripping the 30 per cent share of its closest rival, GMA Network – according to ratings firm Kantar Media Philippines. Kantar managing director Jay Bautista estimated that ABS-CBN’s received the lion’s share of the industry’s advertising revenue at the time, which was upwards of 500 billion pesos (US$10.3 billion).

What next for ABS-CBN, the network that fell afoul of Duterte?
15 Jul 2020


By the end of August, the network was a shell of its former self. It had started slashing its workforce of 11,000 and had also closed all of its radio and television outlets, leaving only a skeleton crew for news and migrating content to the internet, said Jing Reyes, head of ABS-CBN’s integrated news and current affairs division. More lay-offs could still follow, she added.

Duterte has had the knives out for ABS-CBN since his presidential campaign in 2016. He has said he paid for a campaign advertisement that year, but the network never ran the material and sparked the president’s ire by being slow to pay back the fee. It did, however, broadcast an advertisement by an opposition senator that stressed Duterte’s penchant for expletives, and ran stories about the president’s alleged secret bank accounts.

Philippines’ ABS-CBN closes regional stations that served remote communities for decades

In March 2017, he publicly railed against the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the country’s largest newspaper, and ABS-CBN for “rude”, “unfair” and “trash” reporting, especially concerning his war on drugs. He also warned the Prieto and Lopez families, the respective owners of the Inquirer and ABS-CBN, of payback by way of “karma”. The Prieto family sold their stake in the Inquirer in November 2017.

As for ABS-CBN, Duterte said of the company in 2018: “I will not let it pass. Your franchise will end. You know why? Because you are thieves.”

‘HE WILL TREAT YOU WORSE’

This was not Lopez’s first encounter with a difficult president. Duterte’s predecessor, Benigno Aquino III, “was not happy with ABS-CBN”, as was the case with most administrations, according to a prominent member of the Philippine business community, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Lopez first tried to renew ABS-CBN’s franchise in 2014, during the Aquino administration. He withdrew the application after the then president signalled he would not back it, a source said, though Aquino’s former presidential spokesman Edwin Lacierda has denied this.


President Rodrigo Duterte at the Malacanang presidential palace in Manila in September. Photo: AP


While his relationship with Duterte got off to a rocky start, Lopez for years had seemed untroubled by the president’s threats. In fact, during an ABS-CBN shareholders’ meeting in April 2017, the media magnate was bullish about the possibility of obtaining a new licence.

“We haven’t gone through an administration that, at one point or another, has not had some issue with the media in general and ABS-CBN in particular,” Lopez said at the meeting. “So it is part and parcel of our work being a media institution. Suffice to say, the way we will deal with these problems will be not in the public eye but privately.”

This February, during a Senate hearing on renewing ABS-CBN’s franchise, Duterte’s former chief aide, Senator Christopher Go, gave the company another warning sign. “All the president wants is fair reporting,” he said. “If you are bad towards the president, he will treat you worse.”

If tycoons are back in Duterte’s good books, what happened to ABS-CBN?
17 May 2020


ABS-CBN sources told This Week in Asia that Lopez had made a mistake in being slow to return the money Duterte had paid for the unaired advertisements. The company had paid a first portion of the fee back to Durterte, but when it sent the second and final portion, Go – who was still working for the president at the time – told ABS-CBN to hold on to it, which the sources said gave Duterte ammunition to go after Lopez and the network.

It was a meeker Lopez who appeared before the House of Representatives in June to beg for the franchise in a session that also saw him face a barrage of questions, including on his citizenship. The Philippine constitution bars foreigners from owning media outlets, and Lopez had been travelling using an American passport.

It took his legal counsel to explain that since Lopez was born in Boston to Filipino parents, he was allowed to hold dual American-Filipino citizenship, but not before he had been asked to recite the Patriotic Oath – the Philippines’ national pledge.

Despite submitting himself to the intense and at times humiliating questioning, the House committee voted 70-11 on July 10 to reject the issuance of a new franchise for ABS-CBN.

‘DESTROY THE OLIGARCHS’

There is still much speculation as to the reasons behind Lopez’s resignation. Some analysts said it could have been a way to take the heat off, or perhaps protect, the family’s business empire, which also includes the power company First Gen, real estate developer Rockwell Land and several industrial estates.

When he resigned on September 24, also giving up his role as director in all other companies owned by his family, Lopez said he was doing so for “personal reasons”. He could not be reached for comment on the matter. But to observers, he had suffered the fate of other tycoons who had rubbed Duterte the wrong way.


Duterte targeted ABS-CBN for its news coverage critical of him. Photo: AP


The ABS shutdown “certainly sends a signal”, said the prominent Philippine business-person. “It’s a purely authoritarian play. If you had a company to take care of, shareholders and employees, [standing up to Duterte] would give you second thoughts. The business community is the easiest community to scare.”

Ron Acoba, the founder and managing director at Trading Edge Training and Consultancy, said what happened to Lopez was “more or less the same scenario” as had befallen Roberto Ongpin, whom Duterte had singled out upon assuming office as an “oligarch” whom he wanted to “destroy” by way of example.

Philippines: fake accounts shut down by Facebook promoted Duterte, China
24 Sep 2020


Ongpin, who once sat on the board of the South China Morning Post, owned online gaming company Philweb before its licence was revoked by the Duterte government in 2016, after the president railed against “oligarchs who get privileges, concessions, franchise with their saliva only as their capital”.

“Similar to Philweb, [ABS-CBN] was also pushed against the wall with the government not renewing their licence,” Acoba said.

“Roberto Ongpin was essentially ‘forced’ to resign, with the president calling him out in public. His stake was later on sold to Gregorio Araneta, who was on friendlier terms with the [Duterte] administration. The company has since then received a licence to operate. Lopez’s resignation may be a step in a similar direction.”

Ironically, Araneta is from a wealthy and politically powerful family. He owns at least 19 companies in property management, mining, oil and gas and transport, and his wife is Irene Marcos, sister of former senator Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jnr and current Senator Imee Marcos, who are both close Duterte allies.

“If you study all the biggest business houses in Southeast Asia, most, if not all of them, unfortunately, have a patronage with the government,” Acoba said.

In his opinion, because Lopez and ABS-CBN did not play ball with Duterte, the company no longer has “a viable future”, with its share price now down about 90 per cent since its peak in 2016.

For Jing Reyes, the news chief at ABS-CBN, all that is left for the company to do is continue to cover the news while hanging on to existence by a thread.

“We are all trying to survive, basically,” she said. ■




Raissa Robles has written for the SCMP since 1996. A freelance journalist specialising in politics, international relations, business and Muslim rebellion, she has contributed to Reuters, the Economist Intelligence Unit, Daily Mail, Times of London, Radio Netherlands and Asiaweek. She runs the award-winning investigative and opinion blog, raissarobles.com. Her book, Marcos Martial Law: Never Again, a brief history of the dictatorship won the 2017 National Book Awards for Non-Fiction. Her Twitter handle is @raissawriter.
US election: Vietnamese-Americans prefer Trump to Biden — and the president has fans in Vietnam too

Vietnamese-Americans are more likely than other Asian voters to pick Trump, a new survey has found

Trump is also popular in Vietnam, where social media fan pages dedicated to him boast tens of thousands of followers

EVEN AS TRUMP ENDS TEMPORARY VISAS FOR BOAT PEOPLE FROM THE EIGHTIES

Sen Nguyen Published: 3 Oct, 2020


US President Donald Trump during his February 2019 visit to Hanoi, Vietnam. Photo: Reuters
President Donald TRUMP may have stirred up culture wars that target a range of minority groups in the United States, but Vietnamese-Americans are more likely than other Asian-Americans to vote for him in the November election.


A survey – the results of which were released last month – of nearly 1,600 Asian-Americans by the advocacy groups APIAVote, AAPI Data and Asian Americans Advancing Justice, found that 48 per cent of Vietnamese-Americans favoured Trump, versus 36 per cent who supported Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

Other Asian-American voters – including those of Chinese, Indian, Korean, Japanese and Filipino descent – preferred Biden to Trump by a margin of 54 per cent to 30 per cent.

Nothing personal: a lesson for Trump in Vietnamese politics
29 Jun 2017

The results echo those of a similar poll in 2018 by APIAVote and AAPI Data in which Vietnamese-Americans were the only Asian-American group with a majority who approved of Trump’s job performance, at 64 per cent.


Pham Do Chi, one of the founding members of the US-based advocacy group Vietnamese Americans for Trump as President Again, or TAPA, whose members include refugees and veterans of the former South Vietnam military, told This Week in Asia there were clear reasons he preferred Trump.

“Asian-American lives have improved significantly under the Trump presidency, with a very strong economy and nearly full employment before the pandemic,” he said.


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Chi, 71, who has a doctorate in economics and was a former economist at the International Monetary Fund, said he thought Trump had the ability to lift the country out of its current recession, and also liked his tough stance on “illegal immigration” and China.

In comparison, Chi said he thought a Biden administration would increase taxes, “notably on the corporate sector, [which] will prolong this recession much further into 2021 and beyond”.

In a letter addressed to Trump in July, TAPA expressed its “100 per cent support” for the current president and his “Make America Great Again” campaign. The letter also spelled out the group’s gratitude to the US for welcoming Vietnamese refugees, and outlined its deep objections towards communism and Marxism “because it impoverished our country and killed our innocent people”.

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The historical relationship between Vietnam and the US is primarily characterised by the legacy of the Vietnam war, which ended in 1975. That year also marked the beginning of a mass emigration of over 2 million Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian refugees from their home countries. More than 880,000 of the 1.6 million Vietnamese who fled were resettled in the US.


VIRAL IN VIETNAM

In Vietnam, where online fan pages supporting domestic politicians are not common or viral, Trump fan pages boast tens of thousands of followers on Facebook – the most popular social media network in the Southeast Asian country, with over 60 million users.

While it is not clear where the page administrators are based, the phone numbers shown in the “About” section of some pages are all local numbers, and the language used in the posts is Vietnamese, although videos posted on the pages are sometimes in English.

Trump and Biden face off in their first presidential debate on September 30. Photo: Xinhua

On one page with more than 86,000 likes and nearly 290,000 followers, the moderators post various multimedia content, including Trump-focused activities such as his raucous rallies and latest policy moves, as well as strident criticisms of Biden.

A post that has garnered thousands of likes shows an image of Trump and first lady Melania Trump, with the caption: “He has lost friends, but he still has millions of Americans and citizens around the world supporting and staying by his side.”

Trump fandom is also present offline. Luong Minh Trung, 52, stands out at a traditional market in Ho Chi Minh City frequented by those of Khmer origin who now live in Vietnam. His scooter-parking business was named after Trump – making it easy to find because of its unique name, he said. “I only found out about Trump when he became president. He works hard and he cares about his citizens,” Trung said about why he supported Trump, adding that he followed news about the US president via online media.

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3 Oct 2020


Many of his countrymen seem to feel the same way, going by a 2017 study conducted by the Pew Research Center, where respondents from most of the 37 countries included in the poll said Trump was not well qualified to be president – with the exception of Vietnamese respondents.

On Wednesday, after a chaotic first debate between Trump and Biden, a Facebook post by a state television channel on the contest between both men generated more than 1,500 likes and hundreds of comments. One Vietnamese netizen with the username Cuong Van commented: “I hope Mr Trump gets elected to destroy China because China is imperious towards other countries but no president has protested against [China] like Mr Trump [does].”

In Vietnam, Trump fan pages on Facebook boast tens of thousands of followers. Photo: Reuters

Thinh Nguyen, a 62-year-old who came to the United States as a refugee before becoming a citizen, and who now runs a tech company in Ho Chi Minh City, said the Vietnamese penchant for leaning Republican – and hence, for supporting Trump – sprang from many Vietnamese-Americans’ belief that “South Vietnam was lost because of the Democrats”. He said in their minds, it was the Democrats and anti-war leaders in the US during that time who brought down President Richard M. Nixon and forced the Americans out of the war, ultimately leading to the fall of Saigon.

Thinh showed off a button reading, “Vietnamese for Reagan-Bush 84” that he keeps in his home to commemorate how he used to rally support among other Vietnamese-Americans for the two Republicans when they ran for office.

Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis ‘means tougher US line on China’
3 Oct 2020



Thinh said he respected Vietnamese-Americans’ choice to be Republicans, even though he now calls himself a former member of the party after he gradually moved to the left of the political spectrum when he left New Orleans and moved to California in the 1980s.

“You have to be able to see when something is wrong morally and politically,” he said. “If you choose Trump, you are willing to accept corruption and destroy democracy and human rights, something that we have been building for a long time in the US.”


Janelle Wong, a senior researcher for AAPI Data and a core faculty member of the University of Maryland’s Asian-American Studies Programme, said Vietnamese-Americans had an affinity for the Republican Party because it had traditionally been associated with strong anti-communist positions.

“I don‘t believe that Vietnamese are particularly enamoured of Trump, rather a large proportion will vote for the Republican candidate as a result of partisan loyalties, regardless of who that candidate might be,” she said via email.

Wong said that while Vietnamese-Americans might lean Republican overall, they aligned with Democrats when it came to certain policies, as they were generally strong supporters of climate change policies, universal health care and other social safety net programmes.

GENERATION GAP

Among Vietnamese-Americans, like many different groups in the US, younger generations differ substantially from their seniors in views on key social and political issues.

Late last month, Houston-based Apple Broadcasting Television 55.4 channel posted a video on its Facebook page featuring middle-aged looking women and men singing mostly in Vietnamese and some English about their support for Trump.

The first line of their song was “Let us remember in November to vote for President Trump, the person deserving of our vote”. The post garnered thousands of likes and shares.

Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, a professor and historian at Columbia University who specialises in the Vietnam war and US-Southeast Asian relations, said there was “no monolithic Vietnamese-American vote”, as their motivation depended on many factors, including age, socioeconomic status, gender and educational background.

“Without looking at polls and census data, my guess is that the younger generation of Vietnamese-Americans are to the left of the political spectrum [compared with] their parents and grandparents.”

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Diep The Lan, 36, is the son of Vietnamese refugees and a member of the San Jose City Council in California. He said he would vote for Biden because of the former vice-president’s experience in domestic and foreign policy, and his empathy.

Lan, a former Republican who became a Democrat last year, said his father, who fled the former South Vietnam after the war, was a Trump supporter “because he believes a Trump presidency will be beneficial to the pro-democracy movement in Vietnam more than a Biden presidency”.

“Arguably, the vote will be symbolic at best, because California is solidly in favour of Mr Biden, even if the Vietnamese refugee community is not,” he said.

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Colette Brannan, a law student at Yale University who has a Vietnamese-American mother and a white American father, said she chose not to discuss politics with her extended family – some of whom are Trump supporters – to avoid conflicts.

The 24-year-old said she was disheartened to see many older Vietnamese-Americans support Trump, but she was inspired by activist artists at the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network and by Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has publicly criticised Trump and Vietnamese-Americans who support him.

Trump‘s election in 2016 was actually one of the main reasons I decided to become more politically involved and to go to law school,” she said. “And it made me realise I should try and use my own abilities to make the world a better place, because if we do not do it, no one will.” ■




Sen Nguyen is a journalist based in Vietnam specialising in development, human rights, and the environment. Her broadcast commentary has appeared on ITV News podcast and Al Jazeera's The Stream.

Are Singaporean workers really losing jobs to Indian expats due to Ceca free-trade deal?
IMPERIALISM THE HIGHEST FORM OF CAPITALISM

As Singapore stares into its Covid-fuelled deepest recession, job anxiety is fuelling a sudden new wave of resentment over a deal dating back to 2005

Read social media and it seems the immigration floodgates have opened, but the figures tell a different story. Experts say jobs are being created, not lost



Kok Xinghui and Dewey Sim in Singapore
Published: 8:00am, 12 Sep, 2020

Office workers in Singapore. Photo: Reuters

As Singapore’s economy slows amid the coronavirus pandemic and job losses mount, people’s anxieties over their livelihoods have found a convenient target: a free-trade agreement Singapore signed with India in 2005. On social media, the Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (Ceca) is being blamed for willy-nilly letting Indian nationals into Singapore to steal jobs from locals – no matter how many times the government says it is not true.

On a Facebook post of a news article explaining that Ceca did not give Indians automatic access to citizenship, permanent residency or employment, Stephanie Low commented: “Our jobs are taken by Ceca! Wait till the ministers’ jobs are also taken by them, then they will know!”

Others, like Emran Rahman, disparagingly referred to Indians as Ceca, saying: “Everywhere CECA! Even housing estates have them around!”

As virus batters Singapore’s economy, lost jobs loom as long-term headache
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On the public group SG Opposition, Michael da Silva said the government was letting professional Indians in to give them citizenship and eventually gain their vote for the ruling party.

These worries have become more pronounced as Singapore battles its worst recession and countries around the world continue struggling to contain the
Covid-19 pandemic.

Despite multiple clarifications from the authorities that Ceca does not give Indian jobseekers a free pass into Singapore, disgruntled citizens have latched onto two areas within the 16 chapters of the agreement that came into force in 2005. Their points of contention: intra-corporate transfers that let companies bring India-based staff into Singapore for a maximum term of eight years without having to first advertise the jobs to locals, and a list of 127 professions covered by the deal that range from database administrator, to accountants to financial analysts to medical specialists.

People cross a street in the shopping district of Orchard Road, Singapore. Photo: Reuters

Victor Tan, for example, who requested a pseudonym fearing a backlash that could hurt his career, insisted that job woes were caused by Ceca’s “free flow” of Indian nationals coming to Singapore.

He said his 14 years in the relocation industry – helping expatriates move in and out of Singapore – let him see that since 2016, the proportion of nationalities had shifted from being mostly Australian and British, to Indian.

To Tan, the free-trade agreement was “lopsided”. “We don’t see any of our Singapore locals going over to India to hold high positions. Instead, a lot of them are coming here, holding high positions,” he said. “When I was job searching, I didn’t see any opportunities in India for Singaporeans to go over.”

His sweeping views of the free-trade agreement are not based on truth. But they do reflect sentiments on social media.

This “obsession”, said Nanyang Technological University sociologist Laavanya Kathiravelu, should be seen within the context of rising economic uncertainty, with Singapore’s economy
expected to shrink by up to 7 per cent this year, even with a financial stimulus of about S$93 billion (US$68 billion).

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Kathiravelu said: “With the local and global economies experiencing sluggish growth, and many Singaporeans losing their jobs or having to go on reduced pay, the seeming preference for hiring foreigners becomes a higher-stakes issue. It’s being conceived as a zero-sum game, where a job given to a foreigner means one less job for a Singaporean.”

It is not the first time there has been unhappiness over Ceca. Ceca grabbed headlines last year when a man was captured shouting at his
condominium’s security guard and netizens immediately assumed he was an Indian expatriate – in fact, he was born in India but now has Singapore citizenship. Vitriol against Indian nationals since then has grown among opposition voices who use Ceca as an anti-immigration scapegoat and call for it to be abolished.


Political analyst Woo Jun Jie said the debate over foreign labour was long-standing but he sensed a shift in the conversation from when the issue became a political hot potato before the 2011 general election. In the years before that vote the population had grown from 4 million in 2000 to 5 million in 2010, but during the same time frame the number of permanent residents and foreigners almost doubled (from 287,000 PRs and 754,000 foreigners in 2000 to 541,000 PRs and 1,305,000 foreigners in 2010).

A vegetable stall in the Little India district of Singapore. Photo: EPA

While the discussion back then focused on the strain the growing pool of foreigners was placing on public infrastructure, this time the debate revolved around issues of inequality and access.

“Specifically, the public discontent now seems to be centred around job availability and pay levels, particularly for local PMETs [professionals, managers, executives and technicians],” he said.

Consequently, when Singapore’s 14th parliament opened last month, much of the debate was on how best to strike a balance between saving jobs for Singaporeans and not cutting out the foreigners needed to beef up Singapore’s small workforce of just 2.33 million and burnish its reputation as a global city.

Those from the ruling People’s Action Party and the opposition gave many suggestions, from enacting anti-discrimination legislation to naming and shaming companies that favoured foreigners to setting a quota for employment passes, while the authorities took the chance to share statistics.

Intra-corporate transferees, for example, account for less than five per cent of all who hold employment passes (a work pass for higher-skilled workers that carries a minimum salary requirement of S$3,900 or about US$2,850). That worked out to about 9,500 workers, and Indian nationals were but “a small segment” of those, said the ministry of trade and industry.

Still, those like Tan remain unhappy and unelected politician Lim Tean continues to fiercely campaign for Ceca to be abolished.


IS CECA REALLY THAT DIFFERENT?


While public displeasure has zeroed in on Ceca, the free-trade agreement – which has helped trade between Singapore and India grow by S$7.6 billion since 2005 – is not much different from the 24 others that Singapore has signed when it comes to the movement of workers.

In an interview with This Week in Asia, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Trade and Industry said most free-trade agreements had commitments on the movement of workers, including on intra-corporate transferees. 

Only the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) did not include intra-corporate transferees.

“The purpose behind that is to facilitate companies when they invest overseas. When you invest overseas, you will want to bring some of your own employees to start off the investment,” said the spokesperson.

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Minister of Trade and Industry Chan Chun Sing had told local media that Singapore’s Ceca commitments were not unique, and that most of the 164 World Trade Organisation members also had commitments on the entry of intra-corporate transferees under the General Agreement on Trade in Services. He said Singapore companies also made use of the intra-corporate transferees provision to take their employees along when starting out overseas.

Singapore’s Minister of Trade and Industry Chan Chun Sing. Photo: Facebook


Contrary to what Victor Tan and Lim Tean believe, agreements like Ceca benefit Singapore just as they benefit India, the government has maintained. Ceca allows Singapore banks DBS and UOB to set up shop in India, meaning Singapore companies can easily access these banks’ financial services when doing business in India. And there are many doing business in India. Chan said that by 2018, more than 650 Singapore companies had invested in the country.


What is unique about Ceca compared to other free-trade agreements is the annex of 127 professions. But while the list spells out what qualifies as a “profession”, it does not mean that those professionals get free entry into Singapore, or that they are prioritised over others.


“All foreign professionals – including Indian nationals – who wish to come to Singapore must meet work-pass qualifying criteria, including relevant education and professional qualifications, before they are allowed to work in Singapore,” said the Ministry of Trade and Industry spokesperson.


The inclusion of the list, the spokesperson said, was “a negotiated outcome” between Singapore and India.

There have also been many accusations that the finance industry is predominantly filled with Indian nationals. A Facebook user, for example, shared a photo of DBS chief executive Piyush Gupta, a naturalised Singaporean, with Indian staff behind him. The user asked viewers to “find a Singaporean or Chinese” in the photo. Prime Minister
Lee Hsien Loong rebuked the social media user, saying the photo was taken in India where DBS had opened a new office.


Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. File photo

“The person who put up the post surely knew this, yet he irresponsibly misused the [photo] to insinuate that DBS in Singapore was not being fair to Singaporeans,” said Lee in a speech in parliament.

While Leader of the Opposition Pritam Singh’s request in parliament for data on the breakdown of new jobs that went to citizens, foreigners and permanent residents earlier this year was met with wariness, the discontent over claims of foreigners dominating Singapore’s financial services sector seemed to prompt the government to release more data.


Transport Minister Ong Ye Kung, who sits on the board of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, told parliament that financial services employed 171,000 workers and seven in 10 were Singaporean. Just 16 per cent were foreigners while 14 per cent were permanent residents.

From Indian community to Chinese , Singapore feels the strain of immigration
20 Dec 2019



The percentages shift for senior roles, where 44 per cent are Singaporeans, 20 per cent are permanent residents and 36 per cent are foreigners. The foreigners in senior roles, however, are not made up of one nationality.


Ong said: “They come from over 50 countries, the largest group comes from Europe, with other significant nationalities from across Asia and North America.”

Banks in Singapore also shared their employment data with This Week in Asia. Citi Singapore said Singaporeans and permanent residents (PRs) made up around 80 per cent of its total direct hires in the city state, while this number was 95 per cent at its consumer banking department.

Jacinta Low, the head of human resources planning at OCBC Bank, said more than 90 per cent of the bank’s 7,000-strong workforce in Singapore were citizens or PRs. Citizens also account for 82 per cent of the bank’s senior leaders.

For the London-headquartered Standard Chartered bank, 83 per cent of its Singapore workforce were citizens or PRs, as were 90 per cent of its management team, while DBS Bank said over 90 per cent of its 12,000-strong Singapore workforce were Singaporeans and PRs. All 16 members of its top leadership team were Singaporeans.


Standard Chartered’s Singapore office. Photo: Reuters

Academics say the government’s concern that data could be twisted and misinterpreted is not entirely unfounded but sociologist Kathiravelu pointed out that fine-grained data could also help combat speculation based on anecdotes. This could be in the form of a breakdown of non-Singaporeans in specific sectors such as IT or banking, and a further breakdown by income and job title, when there was a perception that there was an over-representation of foreigners.

But opposition politician Lim Tean said the government could opt to cherry-pick data it released and this would not help give Singaporeans the full story. “I am very sceptical of the figures that the government is producing, I make no bones about that,” he said.


QUOTAS, PENALTIES, REGULATIONS


Singapore’s freshly minted parliamentarians raised several suggestions to stem anxieties at last month’s week-long parliamentary session.

Particularly, labour member of parliament (MP) Patrick Tay from the ruling People’s Action Party suggested that Singapore should consider raising the minimum-salary criteria for foreign workers in the IT and professional services sector, referring to how there are generally more firms from the two sectors on the hiring discrimination watch list.

His comments followed the authorities’ recent move to raise the minimum qualifying salary for new Employment Pass holders from S$3,900 to S$4,500. Those in financial services would need to have a minimum salary of S$5,000. The salary floors are also pegged to years of experience, so candidates in their 40s would have to earn around double the minimum qualifying salary. This was largely backed by economists and academics as a step in the right direction to restrict the number of foreign hires.


Tay, who is also the assistant secretary general of the National Trades Union Congress, said harsher penalties could be meted out to firms with discriminatory hiring practices, suggesting the authorities disallow these companies from winning public-sector contracts.


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The manpower ministry could also name and shame firms that repeatedly undermined the government’s efforts to protect its Singaporean workforce, he said, while more legal power could be given to the agency in charge of addressing workplace discrimination and harassment known as the Tripartite Alliance for Fair and Progressive Employment Practices.

Tay also said the authorities could impose a two-tiered quota – one for higher-skilled professionals with higher salaries, and another for mid-skilled executives. This way, companies would still be able to hire foreign talents with specialised skill sets to drive technology-based initiatives, he said.

Singh the opposition leader also called for the government to consider enacting anti-discrimination laws to punish errant companies that discriminated against Singaporean workers.


Singapore’s Manpower Minister Josephine Teo. Photo: AFP

But Manpower Minister Josephine Teo defended the city state’s current laws, saying that punishments, including the curtailment of work-pass privileges, would put pressure on firms.

“Not so many businesses are able to operate with a 100 per cent local employment workforce so this kind of a penalty is much more painful than if we were to, say, introduce a fine,” she said in parliament.

With Singapore seen as a potential beneficiary from businesses seeking to relocate or shift operations amid geopolitical uncertainties, Trade and Industry Minister Chan Chun Sing, at a business forum on Tuesday, said the city state would continue to be open to “top international talent”. But this would be done in a “calibrated manner” to enable businesses to plan for the future and for Singaporeans to learn from them.

“Our foreign worker policies will shift increasingly towards quality rather than quantity,” added Chan.

EASY TARGETS

Meanwhile, the fallout from the polarised debate over Ceca is complex. Indian nationals in the city state feel that they are being unfairly targeted while ethnic Indians – who form 7 per cent of the 3.5-million-citizen population – have expressed frustration at an ethnic group being the focus of racist vitriol, even as they have reservations about new migrants and professionals from India who are perceived to be more class conscious.

IN THE GHETTO
Kathiravelu, the sociologist from Nanyang Technological University, suggested that Indian professional migrants were highly visible because they lived in “residential enclaves” and gravitated towards specific sectors such as IT and banking. 

Even as early as a decade ago, English-language broadsheet The Straits Times reported that Indian families occupied 250 out of the 502 units at The Waterside, an upmarket condominium located in eastern Singapore. Lim, who heads opposition party Peoples Voice, also noted this trend, saying that many residential developments in the East Coast neighbourhood were populated by Indian nationals.


Joggers run near the Merlion Park in Singapore. Photo: Reuters

He said he felt “disturbed” when he visited Changi Business Park, where many financial institutions, including DBS Bank, Citi Group, UBS, Credit Suisse, JP Morgan and Standard Chartered Bank, park their back-end operations and call centres.

“I went there quite a number of times, and I was one of the first to say that when you go there, it feels that you are in a totally different country,” Lim told This Week in Asia. Some Singaporeans have coined the term Chennai Business Park when referring to the industrial area due to the large crowds of Indian nationals working there.


This visibility, said Kathiravelu, made Indians the targets of xenophobia as they were seen as dominating specific industries and not integrating into the social life of the country.
They were also seen as competing with Singaporeans for resources in a way that white or European expatriates were not, she added. “This is perhaps an expression of structural
racism and a colonial hangover where there is still a perception that white expats may be better qualified and suitable for jobs than their Indian or Asian counterparts.”


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Still, Lim stressed he was not “against Indians” or xenophobic but felt that Singaporeans should question why many Indian workers were taking up jobs he believed could be done by locals.

While the nativism that Singapore is grappling with is not unique – opportunistic politicians the world over have flogged such sentiments as countries turn inward – the rise of these feelings is a headache for a city state that relies on an open economy to survive.

Alex Capri, a visiting senior fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Business School, felt this was more of a political issue than an economic one. “This sort of thing plays well in the media. But if looked at objectively, there’s an overall net benefit for Singapore as the multinational enterprises as a whole contribute to Singapore’s economy and create local jobs,” said Capri.

He added that if there were increased regulations to FTAs including Ceca, the city state’s reputation as an open and free hub could be compromised.

Kathiravelu said in times of recession, exclusionary sentiments like xenophobia had been known to rise. “People look for easy targets to blame rather than understanding structural issues for change,” she said.

In an opinion piece in The Straits Times, editor-at-large Han Fook Kwang said Singaporeans’ angst with the immigration policy ultimately came down to insecurities about livelihoods, standards of living and retirement security.


“The more secure they feel, the more open they will be to foreigners. Obviously, no government can guarantee absolute security, but a country’s social safety net plays a major role in providing a minimum level of support,” said Han.

Political analyst Woo Jun Jie said the perception of unfair hiring – such as when 47 employers were placed on a watch list for discriminatory practices – must be dealt with.

Woo said it was good that the government raised the qualifying salaries for foreigners to work in Singapore, but it was “not possible to keep using these as tools to control the foreign worker population, or even to encourage fair employment practices”. Woo said tougher penalties were needed for employers who did not give fair consideration to Singaporean candidates so that companies were nudged towards “organically developing a stronger pro-Singaporean stance, without the need for frequent state interventions”.

“This more organic and ground-up approach may be able to help prevent the emergence of populist politics or racism,” he said. ■