Each day, hundreds of cargo and container ships line up at Singapore’s deep-water port, one of the busiest in the world.
As is so often the case, the Pablo appeared headed through the crowded sea-lanes near Singapore. Each day, hundreds of cargo and container ships line up at the country’s deep-water port, one of the busiest in the world. The Southeast Asian city-state, whose population of 5.9 million is smaller than New York City’s, handles hundreds of millions of barrels of crude oil and fuel shipments each year.
“The whole point of Singapore being in the middle is to find and use that middle space,” says Chong Ja Ian, a political science professor at the National University of Singapore. “You want to show you go with the rules, but you also keep it largely symbolic, with a lot of wriggle room.” Some of the world’s biggest commodities traders, such as Glencore Plc and Trafigura Group Pte Ltd., have operations in Singapore. So do dozens of other trading outfits, including two major Chinese companies: China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., known as Sinopec, and PetroChina Co., which are conduits for meeting Beijing’s energy demands.
The country’s explanation for the move was straightforward: “For a small state like Singapore, this is not a theoretical principle but a dangerous precedent,” the foreign ministry said. “This is why Singapore has strongly condemned Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine.” Singapore-based traders found they could move some transactions to jurisdictions that still welcomed Russian business, passing on deals to subsidiaries in Beijing, Hong Kong or Dubai. Some traders set up corporate intermediaries that helped shield the origin of the oil or the firms involved, all while operating in Singapore.
Source: News Formal (newsformal.com)