Tankers thrive while oil tanks in Singapore

Supertankers are making a mint while idling as de facto floating storage units off the coast of Singapore's oil trading hub

Dozens of oil supertankers have dropped anchor off the coast of Singapore with no clear timetable for when they may offload millions of barrels of unwanted oil they have been chartered to carry.

The Asian oil-trading hub’s onshore storage facilities are at capacity, leaving tankers of varying sizes crowding the seas to serve as floating storage vessels.

To be sure, Singapore isn’t alone in struggling to store surplus barrels. Global demand for oil has plummeted by as much as 30% this year, equal to around 30 million barrels per day, as Covid-19 lockdowns bring much of the global economy to a halt.

An unprecedented supply glut is simultaneously overwhelming global storage facilities as oil producers, refiners and traders hunt for space to store their crude until demand returns and supplies can be sold.

When West Texas Intermediate (WTI) futures contracts for May tumbled into negative territory on April 20, a historic first, the price collapse was attributed to market worries about fast-dwindling storage capacity.

Read the full story at Asia Times.

Nile Bowie is a journalist and correspondent with the Asia Times covering current affairs in Singapore and Malaysia. He can be reached at nilebowie@gmail.com.

Singapore’s oil traders at risk of collapse

Top trader Hin Leong Trading’s financial implosion augurs more industry defaults and bankruptcies ahead

The implosion of one of Singapore’s biggest oil traders, Hin Leong Trading, has sent shockwaves through the city-state’s commodities sector as global oil markets reel from the double whammy of a supply glut and pandemic-pummelled demand.

Local lenders are now curtailing their exposure to all but the biggest industry players, raising the prospect of more defaults and bankruptcies as well as questions about the resilience of Singapore’s status as a global oil trading hub.

Billionaire energy tycoon Lim Oon Kuin, better known as O.K. Lim, stunned creditors this month when he admitted to personally hiding US$800 million in oil futures losses associated with his decades-old company. Millions of barrels of fuel used by the firm as collateral to secure loans had also been sold off to raise funds, he conceded.

Police in Singapore opened an investigation into Lim’s stunning admissions after they came to light on April 20. Hin Leong and its shipping subsidiary, Ocean Tankers, filed for bankruptcy protection when lenders including 23 different banks rejected a proposal to extend its credit facilities and grant a six-month moratorium on debts of $3.85 billion.

Read the full story at Asia Times.

Nile Bowie is a journalist and correspondent with the Asia Times covering current affairs in Singapore and Malaysia. He can be reached at nilebowie@gmail.com.

How Singapore lost its grip on Covid-19

Singapore’s coronavirus response has swung dramatically from success story to cautionary tale

Singapore’s low-wage foreign laborers are falling ill with the coronavirus in their thousands after being quarantined en masse, a development that experts say could put unprecedented strain on the wealthy city-state’s healthcare services as its Covid-19 case numbers surge.

What began as a success story for Singapore owing to its early containment of the disease through quarantines and contact tracing has since turned into a cautionary tale on the public health risks of overlooking swathes of marginalized workers that have now become the Achilles’ heel of the city-state’s coronavirus response.

Not unlike the two economic realities inhabited by Singapore’s transient workers and its citizens and permanent residents, the outbreak itself has been likened to a tale of two infections. When a record 1,426 new cases were reported on April 20, only 16 cases involved Singaporeans and residents with the vast majority of the infections occurring in foreign worker dormitories.

“Singapore is running two epidemic curves at the moment, there’s outside the dorms and inside the dorms,” said Dale Fisher, a senior infectious diseases consultant at the National University Hospital. “One is skyrocketing up just like New York and Italy did, and the other one is plateauing down in low double-figures.”

Read the full story at Asia Times.

Nile Bowie is a journalist and correspondent with the Asia Times covering current affairs in Singapore and Malaysia. He can be reached at nilebowie@gmail.com.

Singapore Airlines could fly higher after Covid-19

SIA has world’s largest Covid-19 grounded fleet but rich state support will give it a post-pandemic edge over debt-ridden rivals

Covid-19’s grounding of airlines worldwide has ensured that only the fittest and best-supported fliers will survive. With rich government backing, Singapore Airlines Group (SIA) is well-positioned to ride out the turbulence and boost its post-pandemic global market share.

Singapore is now estimated to have the world’s largest number of idle aircraft after global travel restrictions forced SIA to ground 96% of its approximately 200-plane fleet on March 23. With infections sharply rising in the city-state and elsewhere, it is unclear when normal operations will resume.

State investment company Temasek Holdings, which owns 55% of the airline, announced on March 27 a mammoth US$13.27 billion funding package for the national carrier, which is consistently ranked among the world’s best airlines and viewed as integral to maintaining Singapore’s position as an Asian travel and business hub.

The sheer size of the bailout suggests that the road to recovery will be long and difficult. Brendan Sobie, veteran aviation analyst and founder of Singapore-based consulting firm Sobie Aviation, nevertheless sees the rescue package as putting SIA “in a very strong long-term position relative to the overall Asian airline industry.”

Read the full story at Asia Times.

Nile Bowie is a journalist and correspondent with the Asia Times covering current affairs in Singapore and Malaysia. He can be reached at nilebowie@gmail.com.

To be foreign and infected in Singapore

City-state’s legions of foreign workers have been hard hit by a fast new surge of Covid-19 cases

With a partial lockdown in effect, Singapore is grappling to contain its worsening Covid-19 outbreak amid a nearly threefold rise in cases since April 1. As stricter penalties for non-compliance come into force, the health crisis has brought the plight of the country’s badly-affected foreign worker community into sharper focus.

A single-day record high of 386 new cases was reported on Monday (April 13), along with the ninth causality to perish in the city-state since the onset of the epidemic. The island-state recorded 2,918 Covid cases as of April 13, with the majority of recent infections affecting foreign worker dormitories across the island republic.

Singapore’s largest cluster, the S11 Dormitory in Punggol, houses some 13,000 workers and has 586 cases. There are 43 foreign worker dormitories in the city-state, where some 200,000 low-wage work-permit holders mostly from South Asia reside. Eight dormitories have so far been sealed off and gazetted by authorities as “isolation areas.”

Local transmission is occurring on a smaller scale in Singapore’s wider community with apparent links to an earlier “second wave” spike in imported cases carried by residents returning from contagion-hit countries such as the United States, Britain and neighboring Malaysia.

Read the full story at Asia Times.

Nile Bowie is a journalist and correspondent with the Asia Times covering current affairs in Singapore and Malaysia. He can be reached at nilebowie@gmail.com. 

Where US and China will clash after the plague

Southeast Asia will face more pressure than ever to take superpower sides when the pandemic finally passes

With the world at a standstill, the Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare an increasingly tense rivalry between China and the United States, the most dangerous dimensions of which could play out in Southeast Asia, a region at the heart of the superpowers’ strategic tensions and rival economic strategies.

On one hand, China has strived to position itself as a global leader in a time of crisis, pursuing a campaign of “face mask diplomacy” in Southeast Asia and beyond with certain success, despite being the initial source of the novel coronavirus that has since caused the most debilitating global disruption seen since World War II.

On the other, US President Donald Trump administration’s widely viewed as inept response to the pandemic, both domestically and internationally, has sown crucial doubts about American leadership, including its failure to work with both allies and adversaries to mount a credible and effective global response to the health emergency.

The superpowers have sparred in a war of narratives and nomenclature to apportion blame for the contagion-caused death and disruption, with a firebrand Chinese spokesperson at one point alleging the US military planted the virus in China and the Trump administration earlier insisting on referring to Covid-19 as the “Chinese” virus.

Read the full story at Asia Times.

Nile Bowie is a journalist and correspondent with the Asia Times covering current affairs in Singapore and Malaysia. He can be reached at nilebowie@gmail.com.

Cracks show in Singapore’s model Covid-19 response

City-state applies more draconian lockdown after previous softer containment measures had won WHO accolades

Singapore’s battle against the Covid-19 pandemic entered a restrictive new phase today (April 7), with the city-state enforcing tough new measures including school and work place closures to curb a recent spike in locally transmitted infections. Authorities say the “circuit breaker” measures will remain in place until at least May 5.

The island nation was among the worst hit during the initial stages of the global outbreak, though it managed to contain the disease’s spread through testing and travel restrictions, aggressive contact tracing and a strict quarantine regime that earned accolades from the World Health Organization (WHO) and others for its model response.

Schools, malls and most businesses across the island nation remained open with specific social distancing guidelines enforced, instilling a semblance of normalcy even as Covid-19 case numbers increased on a smaller-scale than elsewhere. But with community spread now on the rise, the city-state’s lauded containment efforts have come into question.

“We have decided that instead of tightening incrementally over the next few weeks, we should make a decisive move now, to pre-empt escalating infections,” said Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong upon announcing the new measures on April 3.

Read the full story at Asia Times.

Nile Bowie is a journalist and correspondent with the Asia Times covering current affairs in Singapore and Malaysia. He can be reached at nilebowie@gmail.com.

Devout at a distance in contagion-hit Brunei

Muslim nation quickly dispensed with notion it had divine protection against Covid-19 and implemented a model pandemic response

When Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah delivered an address at the opening of Brunei’s annual legislative session on March 9, he expressed gratitude to “God” that his nation remained free of Covid-19 infections. At the time, the oil-rich Borneo sultanate was still one of the last countries in Southeast Asia without a confirmed case.

The monarch began an otherwise down-to-earth speech on the economic repercussions of the viral global pandemic for energy-dependent Brunei by ascribing the Islamic nation’s virus-free status to divine “protection” gained through prayer.

“Brunei is constantly praying, in our mosques, houses and assemblies. With continued prayers, Brunei will continue to receive divine blessings and protection,” said the sultan, one of the world’s few remaining absolute rulers, in his speech officiating the Legislative Council (LegCo) sitting.

Hours after his speech, Brunei confirmed its first Covid-19 case. Within days, there were dozens of new cases linked to Bruneians returning from a mass gathering of pious Muslims in Malaysia organized by the missionary Tablighi Jamaat movement in late February, Southeast Asia’s largest coronavirus cluster to date with confirmed infections in multiple countries.

Read the full story at Asia Times.

Nile Bowie is a journalist and correspondent with the Asia Times covering current affairs in Singapore and Malaysia. He can be reached at nilebowie@gmail.com.