Babies Bought and Doctors Tax Dodge
Allegations of baby trafficking surface, doctors are caught dodging taxes, Temasek bets big on AI, and Singapore's port is still on top.
Singapore business, finance and trade news, every Monday.
Babies Bought in Indonesia, Approved in Singapore
“Marcus” was months old when he arrived in Singapore, cleared by local authorities and handed to adoptive parents who'd been waiting for a child. He is one of at least 20 babies allegedly bought from Indonesian parents and trafficked into Singapore for adoption, part of a case now sending nearly two dozen people to trial in West Java. Neither government has said whether the children will stay with the families who raised them or be sent back to their biological parents in Indonesia. Roughly two-thirds of children adopted in Singapore each year are born abroad, usually in neighboring countries. Marcus's parents, who asked to be called David and Ally to protect their case, paid tens of thousands of dollars in fees they were told covered agency work, legal costs, and expenses for the child. His adoption sailed through Singapore's approval process.
Read more: BBC
Tharman Visits KL as Bilateral Trade Up 14.5%
President Tharman Shanmugaratnam will be in Kuala Lumpur today to being a three-day state visit, reciprocating Sultan Ibrahim's May 2024 trip to the Istana, with a full diplomatic agenda including a welcome ceremony, state banquet and courtesy call from Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. A six-member delegation has gone along with the president, and their visit includes a business roundtable in KL. In a Bernama interview, Tharman said the relationship was "unique" and said it "has never been, and must never be, a purely transactional" one. Bilateral trade last year was RM402.35 billion ($93.97 billion), and the first five months of 2026 are on pace for a 14.5 percent year-on-year lift.
Read more: CNA (trade fracture), CNA (Amirudin Shari meeting), The Star (DEFA $2T target), AsiaOne (hearts shake hands), Malay Mail (trade partner ranking)
IRAS Claws Back $49M Doctors' Tax Dodge
IRAS, the tax authority, has identified 279 high earners who were funneling salaries through private companies to dodge a 24 percent personal tax rate on income above $1 million, and is clawing back $49 million in 124 cases. All but one involved disguising income as dividends or interest-free shareholder loans, taxed at 17 percent (or often less, after incentives) at the corporate level. One doctor declared a monthly salary of $5,000 to $6,000 while pulling more than $12 million in dividends and shareholder loans over six years. IRAS can now tax the dividends and loans as the doctors' own income.
Read more: AsiaOne
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Crypto Scam Blitz Saves $7 Million
The Anti-Scam Centre and Cyber Investigation Branch spent six weeks, from April 16 to May 31, mining blockchain data in concert with Chainalysis and TRM Labs to identify and catch transfers headed for government-impersonation, investment, romance and job scams. Seven exchanges, Coinbase, Coinhako, Gemini, Independent Reserve, OKX, StraitsX and Upbit, shared customer details fast enough for police to make more than 145 phone and in-person interventions, heading off $4.2 million in losses. A June follow-up safeguarded another $2.9 million from more than 130 victims, so the running total is more than $7 million and nearly 300 people.
Read more: Cryptonews (public-private partnership), Cryptobriefing (real-time tracing)
PDPC Wants Explicit AI-Training Notices
The PDPC wants firms to stop hiding AI training behind fine print like "new product development" and tell users directly when their data will be feeing a generative model. A bank building a chatbot, an insurer training on claims histories, or a social platform improving image generation would each need a specific pop-up, webpage, or email, explaining exactly what the AI does and how to opt out. A text-to-speech feature, for example, would have to disclose that voice recordings will be used to teach the model to recognize speech patterns, not vaguely "improve services." A one-month consultation on the issue was closed July 1.
Read more: Straits Times
Port Tops Maritime Ranking for 13th Straight Year
Singapore held onto the top spot in the Xinhua-Baltic ISCD Index again, scoring 99.32 out of 100, a title it has kept every year since the ranking was introduced in 2014. Shanghai pulled up second at 84.27, London was third with 81.80. The port handled (a record) 44.66 million TEUs in 2025 and sold 56.77 million tonnes of bunker fuel, and is still the world's busiest refueling stop.
Read more: Yahoo Finance
HDB Invokes 1980 Plan to Clear Most of Maju Forest
HDB will clear 15 of Maju Forest's 23 hectares in Clementi's Sunset Way area for new public housing based on residential zoning that dates to the 1980 Master Plan. Eight hectares will remain untouched, including a freshwater stream and land around the former Jurong railway line, where a four-kilometre nature trail is being considered. Nature Society Singapore's Lester Tan says that the retained third is"the minimum compromise," and claims that pangolins could be pushed into the nearby landed enclave and HDB blocks once construction begins. Unit counts and construction timelines haven't been released yet, but public consultation will run through August 6.
Read more: The Independent Singapore (public backlash), Business Times (Clementi Nature Trail)
Temasek Puts 15% on AI by 2031
Temasek plans to more than double the AI slice of its S$518 billion ($383 billion) portfolio, from 6% (roughly S$31 billion) to 15% (roughly S$78 billion), according to Temasek Global Investments CEO Chia Song Hwee. The state investor has been working toward this since 2016, when it decided that digitisation was a structural trend. The organization formed a dedicated AI group in 2019 and then launched Aicadium, which is now a 60-member team of technologists, engineers and researchers in Singapore and the US who are working to push AI tools into portfolio companies including DBS, Singapore Airlines and ST Engineering.
Read more: Business Times (employee AI training), FX Street (GDP breakdown)
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