Australian Influences on the Insider Trading Laws in Singapore

Abstract

The insider trading laws in Singapore have been revamped with the passing of the Securities and Futures Act 2001, a comprehensive legislation dealing with the regulation of securities and futures markets in Singapore. Our new insider trading provisions have been largely modelled after the equivalent provisions in the Australian Corporations Act 2001. This paper seeks to discuss the background for the reforms to insider trading law in Singapore and will argue that these reforms have come about because of an earlier adoption of Australian legislation on securities regulation in the area of initial public offers, entailing a continuity and coherence in the policy rationale for the securities laws in Singapore. This paper will also discuss the Australian origins of the new Singapore provisions and examine comparatively our Singapore provisions with their Australian precedents. I will discuss how the Australian origins may affect the interpretation of these provisions in Singapore. I will also point out a significant difference between our legislation and our Australian precedent, namely, that we have retained a specific provision on connected persons as insiders and have shifted the onus of proof to connected persons to deny that there was insider trading upon the satisfaction of the existence of certain factors.