At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in November, Euromoney put a question to host nation Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, who had spent part of his morning in talks with US president Barack Obama. The Obama administration, we said, was getting tough on private-banking centres over client confidentiality and bank secrecy, most obviously Switzerland. Is that scrutiny coming to Singapore too, and what’s the impact on the country’s private-banking industry – a mainstay of its financial services success story – if it does?
Lee told us it had not featured in discussions with Obama. He underlined Singapore’s "high standards of probity and integrity", and revealed that Singapore had now signed...
