| Summary: | Prior to the Asian financial crisis in 1997, corporate governance regulation in Singapore belongs to one of a merit-based. Under a merit-based regime, strict rules are in place to restrict transactions that firms may undertake, whereby the adequacy of the disclosure and merits of the transactions would first have to be considered by the regulators. In a bid to develop Singapore as an international financial centre, the Monetary Authority of Singapore embarked on a review of its existing policies from year 1997, and made reforms to the corporate governance standards, to adopt a more robust, market oriented and disclosure-based corporate governance regime, to be more in line with the more recognized Anglo American standards.
This paper seeks to explore the corporate governance reforms in Singapore for the past two decades. We begin by look at the history of corporate governance regime, and the motivations behind the state’s reforms to the standards. Our focus will be on the issue of independent directors in Singapore, in particular, the three local banks of Singapore. While we had witnessed an array of the corporate governance reforms over the years, we are still far from behind the Anglo-American standards, attributed to the balancing act between the global market logic and resilience from the local market.
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