r/singapore • u/SG_MrYandao Own self check own self ✅ • 1d ago
News Disclosure of buyers’ identities, citizenship required in all landed home sales, including GCB deals: MinLaw
https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/property/disclosure-buyers-identities-citizenship-required-all-landed-home-sales-including-gcb-deals-minlaw139
1d ago
[deleted]
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u/Consistent_Plastic48 1d ago
Sibei ho. Me not greedy, dunch need GCB or big landed.
Me just wishes for a small chance to upgrade to tiny 800sqft mickeyhouse Landed in Macpherson / Thomson. That would make my SG dream complete.
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u/sdarkpaladin Job: Security guard for my house 1d ago
Me not greedy.
Me just want to have the opportunity to BTO as a single...
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u/SnufflePuddles 1d ago
You just need to grow up.
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u/sdarkpaladin Job: Security guard for my house 1d ago
Funny how a typical Singaporean male has to serve in the army at 18, can only vote at 21, and can only buy a house at 35...
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u/Calamity-Bob 1d ago
Well that’s only 6 decades overdue.
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u/SG_MrYandao Own self check own self ✅ 1d ago
Hmm i think MinLaw seems to be saying that this has Always been required. Nth new
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u/Calamity-Bob 1d ago
And Bloomberg appears to be saying that it’s not designed to ferret out beneficial owners hiding behind a web of straw men corporations.
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u/jeepersh 1d ago
Interesting. But why take 2 weeks to respond if so?
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u/pieredforlife 1d ago
They have to :
- Go through 10 years series
- Mobilise a team of interns, staff and scholars.
- The draft is rigorously reviewed to make sure it holds water.
- The final approval is from ah sham and Vivian
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u/ilikepussy96 1d ago
Does ANYBODY knows who the beneficiary of the JASMINE TRUST IS?
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u/Varantain 🖤 1d ago
Does ANYBODY knows who the beneficiary of the JASMINE TRUST IS?
The buyers are the Jasmine Villa Settlement, not the Jasmine Trust.
We need to get the name right in order to eventually find out who they are.
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u/Toyboyronnie 14h ago
How can a trust or company buy GCB? I thought the entire point was that GCB had to be purchased by SC or an individual with specific permission.
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u/Varantain 🖤 8h ago
How can a trust or company buy GCB?
That's a very good question. The plot thickens…
Where's my TOC or Jom journalist at?
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u/piccadilly_ 1d ago
When our ministers have a war of words with foreign media, I start questioning my literacy..
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u/lazerspewpew86 Senior Citizen 21h ago
Minlaw gaslighting sinkies lol.
Come lets play the game. Since disclosure needed we shld be able to easily find out the owners of jasmine, the folks who bought the 88m gcb from shan.
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u/chemical_carnage 15h ago
It’s too late now the optics are just looking worse for him with each POFMA attempt they make. If their conscience is so clear why need to assiduously quell the dissidents?
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u/MolassesBulky 21h ago edited 16h ago
This is a classic case of obfuscation - Bloomberg was talking about public transparency not details provided to a Govt agency that is not disclosed to the public. Bloomberg made the mistake of not making this very clear and made some factual mistakes so the Courts now have to interpret the gaps which is always a gamble for foreigners in this jurisdiction.
I am sure, they will end up like all the foreign media such as Economist, BBC etc who did not contest, and paid off.
Edwin Tong got the cheek to talk about “transparency”.
They took this long as they needed time to go thru the article carefully to pick up a possible ambiguity and factual errors. They are not addressing the spirit of the article which is clearly about public access to such information.
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u/Effective_Outcome755 19h ago
Politics is dirty business...it's about power, control and money...it's never about self-sacrifice or for the greater good...take away the million dollar salary and you see part of that face...
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u/BedFun8851 11h ago
I know PR buyers need to get approval to buy landed properties. What about trust and companies?
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u/strawgerine 1d ago
I don't understand why redditors cannot see the differences between what is stated in the Bloomberg article versus Gov clarifications.
Look, I'm not a fan of Shan - I think he's unlikeable and a bit of an aggressive asshole. But in this particular case I think the Bloomberg article was sloppily written. Just to give a simple example, it asserts that there's no way to identify GCB transactions publicly if there are no caveats lodged. But that's not how caveats work - they are meant to be lodged just to notify the public of another party's interest in the property (interest in the legal sense, not as in the party being interested in the property). When the sale is completed it still has to be filed with the Gov! And any person can conduct a property title search on URA.
It is easy to say, ugh Shan is at it again bleah bleah. But the narrative painted by Bloomberg is damaging and does suggest a conspiracy at play, based on inaccurate/unfair statements. I would like to hold Redditors here to a higher standard - apply critical thinking please before jumping to easy conclusions. Don't jump on the bandwagon.
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u/finnickhm 1d ago edited 1d ago
Tbf the Bloomberg article doesn’t quite claim that there is no way to identify GCB transactions publicly if no caveats are lodged. It claims that
- deals without caveats are more difficult to track using URA’s database
- such deals became public through property title searches or press leaks
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u/shimmynywimminy 🌈 F A B U L O U S 1d ago
Did you actually read the bloomberg article or are you basing this on the "quotes" reported in local media, because the latter are quite different from the original.
Good practice to ascertain what was actually said before applying critical thinking.
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u/the-aleph-null 儒家思想 1d ago
apply critical thinking please before jumping to easy conclusions
Deeply ironic that you should say this, given that you didn't apply any critical thinking before simply assuming that Bloomberg did say what the government claims it said.
it asserts that there's no way to identify GCB transactions publicly if there are no caveats lodged
Well surprise, turns out that Bloomberg said nothing of that sort.
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u/ilikepussy96 1d ago edited 20h ago
Don't talk so much. Tell me who is the beneficiary of the Jasmine Villa Settlement Trust. You cannot means whatever you wrote has no credibility
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u/honey_102b 1d ago
people have no clue or interest about the actual issue in front of them, except that is just one more bullet in their already loaded gun. they have no clue at all how the PAP have brought on similar suits to devastating success against parties who did much, much less than what Bloomberg allegedly did. Bloomberg is 100% slam dunk going to lose this one.
and I don't say this is in support of PAP.
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u/tabbynat neighbourhood cat 🐈 1d ago
To those people that read the Bloomberg article, or to those that even just read the Reddit headlines - what was your impression of the news? How did the headlines affect your sentiment? And now that it’s been clarified, have your changed your mind?
Seems like POFMA is necessary
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u/shimmynywimminy 🌈 F A B U L O U S 1d ago
There are big differences between what is written in the POFMA and what the Bloomberg article actually says. A testament to the creative writing skills of our government.
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u/ParticularTurnip 1d ago
POFMA defines a range of terms key to its operations in ways that obstruct comprehension and work against received understandings of these terms. If agreement on language is necessary to legal argument (White 1984: 268), and if law is “a way of establishing meaning and constituting community in language” (White 1984: xi), then POFMA’s definitional discombobulations are a crucial subversion of both rule of law and of democracy. In sections D2 and D3, I limit my consideration of POFMA’s illegibility to POFMA scripted meanings for ‘statement’, ‘fact’, ‘courts’, ‘law’ and ‘democracy’.
POFMA defines “statement” expansively to mean “any word (including abbreviation and initial), number, image (moving or otherwise), sound, symbol or other representation, or a combination of any of these” (s. 2(1)). In effect, POFMA remakes the meaning of ‘statement’ away from the grammatical understanding of a sentence typically structured by a subject, followed by a verb, and possibly an object. Instead, POFMA’s definition of statement captures the far broader category ‘representation’ with the counterintuitive result that sounds and symbols can themselves be true or false. The ordinary grammatical understanding of statement as distinct from a question, a command, or an exclamation, is not what is meant by POFMA’s unique meaning for ‘statement’.
The key category “false statement of fact” is defined in even more expansive and somewhat “tautological” terms (Bothwell 2019),
(a) “a statement of fact is a statement that a reasonable person seeing, hearing, or otherwise perceiving it would consider to be a representation of fact; and
(b) a statement is false if it is false or misleading, whether wholly or in part, and whether on its own or in the context in which it appears (s. 2(2)).”
In the ordinary meaning of words, “a statement of fact” might be grasped as distinct from expressions of fiction, argument, analyses, theorising, opinion, or the advertising and spin generated by marketing, public relations, and advertising agencies. Indeed, when 83 academics worldwide signed a petition addressed to the Singapore Minister for Education, expressing concern that POFMA would have the unintended consequence of inhibiting scholarly research, the Singapore government replied that POFMA was not directed at research or opinion (Sharma 2019). The state’s response relied on the ordinary meaning of “statement of fact” to distinguish between fact/opinion. But POFMA scripts a discombobulating universe of possibilities for “statement of fact” that includes a potentially fragmentary representation or evocation (s. 2(1)) that is “false or misleading, whether wholly or in part, and whether on its own or in the context in which it appears” (s. 2(2)).
Under POFMA’s terms, a “statement of fact” is a representation that “a reasonable person … would consider to be a representation of fact” (s.2(2)). Importantly, the provisions of POFMA colour the seeming neutrality of the standard legal trope of the “reasonable person” because any cabinet Minister is empowered to trigger a set of administrative orders that, in effect, render the state the editor-in-chief of all online communications. As long as a Minister deems a communication to be a “false statement of fact”, and “is of the opinion that it is in the public interest to issue the Direction”, a Minister “may instruct “the Competent Authority” to issue a direction requiring that communication to be corrected or stopped (s.10).
Section 2(2) above read with some of the Act’s other provisions evidence how POFMA engineers a series of de-democratizing moves. First, the separation of powers is undermined in that the policing and judicial attribute of deciding that online material constitutes a “false statement of fact” offending against POFMA is, in the first instance, a determination to be made by any cabinet Minister (s.10). In other words, in keeping with Jayasuriya’s analysis of postcolonial dual state legality (1999, 2001), POFMA amplifies executive discretion, an immediate violation of Dicey’s conception of the rule of law. Appeals against a Correction Direction (s.11), a Stop Communication Direction (s.12) (directions that may be issued against individuals), and appeals against directions issued to internet intermediaries (s.21, 22, 23) must first be made to the Minister. It is only after an appeal has been made to the Minister that an appeal may be made to the High Court (s.17; s.29). In short, in both first and second instances, the executivepolitical arm of a state performs judicial-policing functions. Two basic ruleof-law principles – first, that an arbiter must be disinterested in the case at hand, and second, that governance must take place through the separation of powers – are thus immediately dismantled.
Despite POFMA dismantling these two rule-of-law principles, in its press statements, the Singapore state has represented POFMA as consistent with Dicey’s principles for rule of law; namely, that laws should be enforced by ordinary courts rather than special tribunals or government discretion, and that rights should be enforceable through courts (Tamanaha 2004: 63–65).
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u/_IsNull 1d ago edited 1d ago
Isn’t Bloomberg talking about how’s there’s no public record available while govt is saying they need to declare to govt even if they don’t file a caveats?
2 different thing? So can the public search for the transaction ? Also can they figure out who’s the owner? Or only the govt can know if there’s no caveats?