Indonesia gets all hoity-toity

YOU know that not much happened yesterday when the media is filled with what is sometimes known as M&M news. You know, more and more seniors are going for training, more and more people are going Down Under for an education, more and more people people opting to trade the tail end of their HDB lease for cash. (That’s the Lease BuyBack scheme from the HDB, which had plenty of four-roomers taking it up after it was opened to them in April).

Also, more and more Cotton On Group shops will be sprouting up, from the current 1,300, in 17 countries to 2,000 in the next three years, according to ST. (It currently has 74 stores in Singapore.) And people wonder why malls no longer offer a unique shopping experience. Read what we found about the malls here.

There’s also more power to the G, this time to deal with errant retailers who “close shop” when in trouble and then reopen under another name somewhere else. Officers from Spring Singapore will be able to barge into stores to seize evidence under proposed amendments to the Fair Trading Act. Shady retailers can be served with an injunction to stop selling, which they must publicise on their sales invoices or on posters at the shopfront. Now, if this isn’t a warning to consumers not to patronise the shop, we don’t know what is. Imagine getting a sales invoice which says “not allowed to sell” just before putting your money down. It’ll cause another commotion.

Pity that such power hasn’t been extended to cover companies which fail to pay sub-contractors, even though they’ve received the big payout from the client. This is what subcontractors who were involved in a Public Utilities Board (PUB) project are facing, after the main contractor Anaergia Private Limited changed hands. PUB has already paid the firm $3.3 million but the smaller players have yet to lay hands on their share despite work done. TODAY which has been tracking the story had financial experts questioning the conduct of its main company, Anaergia, which had sold off the Singapore affiliate to a third party which took on the name Anaergia Singapore. The global multinational seems to have washed its hands off the business.

And it looks like Indonesia wants Singapore to lay off Indonesian businesses which the Republic suspects are involved in burning activities. It is getting all prickly because Singapore wants to question a director who was in Singapore – and who failed to turn up for the interview despite a legal notice to do so. The Indonesians, particularly Environment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar (yes, that’s the one who told Singapore to shaddup about the haze last month), is threatening to cut off bilateral environmental projects, whether ongoing or planned, with Singapore.

Rather hoity-toity she is about it too: “We are only going to inform Singapore, at a later stage, of the existing bilateral collaborations that are to be terminated as well as those planned collaborations which will not go ahead. Basically, we only feel obliged to notify them of our decisions.”

Well, we know the Transboundary Haze Pollution Act passed in 2014 by Parliament was bound to raise some sovereign hackles. Singapore issued legal notices to six Indonesia-based companies to explain its measures to tackle haze pollution but only two have responded so far.

Maybe Jakarta could do us the favour of interviewing the un-named director of the un-named company on Singapore’s behalf.

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Featured image from TMG file. 

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