Adani Ports gets about US$150 million loan from DBS
The proceeds of the four-year dollar loan will be used for capital expenditure, the people said, asking not be identified because the information is private. The facility has been priced at about 200 basis points above the benchmark Secured Overnight Financing Rate, they said.
The all-in-price, including the hedging cost, is about 5.5 per cent, one of the person said. DBS declined to comment. An Adani Group representative did not offer any immediate comments on the transaction.
Billionaire Gautam Adani-owned conglomerate, with interests stretching from ports to green energy, is steadily regaining creditor confidence following a US Department of Justice indicted Adani over an alleged bribery plot in November. The bilateral loan is the group's first from a global bank since the indictment, one of the person said.
Last month, the group raised about US$750 million through an offshore private placement bond to fund an acquisition of a construction firm. BlackRock subscribed to about a third of the issuance. Separately, the conglomerate is in talks with foreign banks including Barclays, First Abu Dhabi Bank and Standard Chartered Bank for a US$750 million loan for its airport unit.
Representatives for Adani and his companies recently met US administration officials to discuss potentially dismissing criminal charges levied against him in the bribery probe, Bloomberg reported earlier this month. BLOOMBERG
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Straits Times
41 minutes ago
- Straits Times
China's $14 trillion stock market is a headache for both Xi and Trump
BEIJING - At the heart of why consumers in China save so much and spend so little, and why Xi Jinping and Donald Trump will struggle to change that behaviour even if they want to, lies the country's US$11 trillion (S$14 trillion) stock market. Even after a recent rally, Chinese indexes have only just returned to levels seen in the aftermath of a dramatic bubble burst a decade ago. Instead of incentivising consumers to spend, poor equity returns have nudged them toward saving. A US$10,000 investment in the S&P 500 Index a decade ago would now have more than tripled in value, while the same amount in China's CSI 300 benchmark would've added just around US$3,000. Part of the reason, long-term China watchers say, is structural. Created 35 years ago as a way for state-owned enterprises to channel household savings into building roads, ports and factories, exchanges have lacked a strong focus on delivering returns to investors. That skew has spawned a host of problems from an oversupply of shares to questionable post-listing practices, which continue to weigh on the market. The country's leaders are under pressure to fix this. President Xi is counting on domestic spending to reach the 5 per cent economic growth goal, especially as a tariff war with the United States heats up over the massive trade imbalance. At the same time, Beijing has reasons to keep prioritizing the market's role as a source of capital: the country needs vast funding to nurture companies that underpin its tech ambitions – even if their profitability remains questionable. 'China's capital market has long been a paradise for financiers and a hell for investors, although the new securities chief has made some improvements,' Liu Jipeng, a securities veteran who teaches at China University of Political Science and Law, said in an interview. 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'State-owned companies primarily answer to the government rather than shareholders, while many private entrepreneurs have little regard for small investors.' Over the past year, China's top leadership has shown greater awareness of the stock market's importance as a vehicle for wealth creation. That's especially the case with an ongoing property slump and a fragmented social safety net, which exacerbates a sense of insecurity. The Communist Party's Politburo pledged to 'stabilise housing and stock markets' in a December meeting – a rare expression of support for equities at the high-level gathering. The body also called for 'increasing the attractiveness and inclusiveness of domestic capital markets' in July. There is no quick fix to boosting household confidence 'except for a stock market rebound,' said Hao Hong, chief investment officer at Lotus Asset Management. 'This is a topic that we economists have been discussing in the closed door meetings in Beijing.'' In some ways, the market's malaise has been decades in the making. 'The exchanges are motivated to fulfill the government's call for increasing companies' financing,' said Lian Ping, chairman of the China Chief Economist Forum, a think tank that advises the government. 'But when it comes to protecting investors' interests, there are few who are motivated to do it.' An explosive growth in new listings made China the world's biggest IPO market in 2022. Yet insufficient safeguards for shareholders and lax oversight of IPO frauds have led to share price crashes and delistings – what retail investors refer to as 'stepping on a land mine.' Take Beijing Zuojiang Technology, which listed in 2019. The company said in a 2023 statement that its product was modeled after Nvidia's BlueField-2 DPU. The company warned in January the following year that it was at risk of being delisted, citing an investigation for disclosure violations. It was subsequently removed from the Shenzhen bourse. The China Securities Regulatory Commission didn't immediately reply to a fax seeking comment. Recent years have seen greater efforts to screen poor-quality IPOs and crack down on financial fraud. There's also a push to reduce additional stock issuances by listed companies and share sales by major stakeholders, while encouraging more corporate profit to be passed on to investors. There has been visible progress. Initial public offerings shrank to nearly a third of 2023 levels in 2024. Shanghai and Shenzhen-listed companies handed out a combined 2.4 trillion yuan (S$429 billion) in cash dividends for 2024, up 9 per cent from the previous year, according to state media. 'The regulations and overall requirements after IPO have become stricter, in terms of reliability, transparency, or information disclosure,' said Ding Wenjie, investment strategist at China Asset Management. Reforms, however, have fallen short of transforming the market into one that prioritises investor returns. Even with the rise in share buybacks, CSI 300 companies spent only 0.2 per cent of their market value on repurchasing shares in 2024, far less than the nearly 2 per cent spent by S&P 500 firms, according to calculations by Bloomberg. The recent policy push to attract more tech listings is also a worrying sign for some investors. Regulators are resuming the listing of unprofitable companies on the Star board, dubbed China's Nasdaq, while allowing them for the first time for the Shenzhen-based ChiNext board – which is earmarked for growth enterprises. IPOs so far this year have increased by nearly 30 per cent from the same period in 2024. That's an inevitable move to secure capital for firms that are vital to China's battle against the US for supremacy in AI, semiconductor and robotics, but also signals that authorities may again be putting funding needs ahead of investor protection. Fast-tracking more firms to list without tackling the core problems of corporate credibility will 'just add volume without restoring investor trust,'' said Hebe Chen, an analyst at Vantage Markets in Melbourne. BLOOMBERG


CNA
41 minutes ago
- CNA
Singer Sean Kingston sentenced to 3.5 years in prison for US$1 million fraud scheme
Singer Sean Kingston was sentenced to three and a half years in prison Friday (Aug 15) after being convicted of a US$1 million (S$1.28 million) fraud scheme in which he leveraged his fame to dupe sellers into giving him luxury items that he then never paid for. Kingston, whose legal name is Kisean Paul Anderson, and his mother, Janice Eleanor Turner, were convicted in March by a federal jury of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and four counts of wire fraud. Turner was sentenced to five years in prison last month. Before US Judge David Leibowitz handed down Kingston's sentence, the singer apologised to the judge in the South Florida courtroom and said he had learned from his actions. His attorney asked if he could self-surrender at a later date due to health issues, but the judge ordered him taken into custody immediately. Kingston, who was wearing a black suit and white shirt, removed his suit jacket and was handcuffed and led from the courtroom. Assistant US Attorney Marc Anton described Kingston as someone addicted to his celebrity lifestyle even though he could no longer afford to maintain it. 'He clearly doesn't like to pay and relies on his celebrity status to defraud his victims,' Anton said Friday. The federal prosecutor described a yearslong pattern by Kingston of bullying victims for luxury merchandise and then refusing to pay. 'He is a thief and a conman, plain and simple,' Anton said. Defense attorney Zeljka Bozanic countered that the 35-year-old Kingston had the mentality of a teenager – the age he was when he vaulted to stardom. The attorney said Kingston had almost no knowledge of his finances, relying on business managers and his mother. 'No one showed him how to invest his money,' Bozanic said. 'Money went in and money went out on superficial things.' Bozanic said Kingston has already started paying back his victims and intends to pay back every cent once he is free and can start working again. Leibowitz rejected the idea that Kingston was unintelligent or naive, but the judge said he gave Kingston credit for accepting responsibility and declining to testify rather than possibly lying in court. That was in contrast to Kingston's mother, whose trial testimony Leibowitz described as obstruction. Kingston and his mother were arrested in May 2024 after a SWAT team raided Kingston's rented mansion in suburban Fort Lauderdale. Turner was taken into custody during the raid, while Kingston was arrested at Fort Irwin, an Army training base in California's Mojave Desert, where he was performing. According to court records, Kingston used social media from April 2023 to March 2024 to arrange purchases of luxury merchandise. After negotiating deals, Kingston would invite the sellers to one of his high-end Florida homes and promise to feature them and their products on social media. Investigators said that when it came time to pay, Kingston or his mother would text the victims fake wire receipts for the items, which included a bulletproof Escalade, watches and a 19ft (5.9m) LED TV, investigators said. When the funds never cleared, victims often contacted Kingston and Turner repeatedly, but were either never paid or received money only after filing lawsuits or contacting law enforcement, authorities said. Kingston, who was born in Florida and raised in Jamaica, shot to fame at age 17 with the 2007 hit Beautiful Girls, which laid his lyrics over Ben E King's 1961 song Stand By Me. His other hits include 2007's Take You There and 2009's Fire Burning.
Business Times
an hour ago
- Business Times
OpenAI staffers to sell US$6 billion in stock to softbank, other investors
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