The company that supplies most of China's jet fuel was yesterday granted a six-week extension for a restructuring plan following massive trading losses, a company lawyer said.
China Aviation Oil (Singapore) Corp (中國航油), whose parent company is owned by the Chinese government, had gone to court to seek more time after announcing last week that it had lost US$550 million in oil pricing gambles.
The Singapore High Court had initially set a Dec. 13 deadline for the restructuring plan.
"The court has given us six weeks' extension and six months to call a creditors' meeting," China Aviation's lawyer, Patrick Ang, said after an hour-long hearing.
The Singapore subsidiary had sought court protection from creditors, who had demanded payment as China Aviation's losses ballooned.
Its suspended chief, Chen Jiulin (
Also attending the court session yesterday were lawyers for the creditors, which include Mitsui & Co Energy Risk Management, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp, Fortis Bank SA and Barclay's Capital PLC.
It began losing on oil derivatives in the first quarter of this year but continued to gamble that crude and jet fuel prices would fall for the rest of the year. Benchmark crude prices closed to an all-time high of US$55.17 per barrel in late October.
The extension announcement came as authorities investigated the massive losses, which have led to allegations of insider trading.
The Securities Investors Association -- an independent group which in 2002 voted China Aviation Oil the most transparent company in Singapore -- has said the losses bore the hallmarks of insider trading.
Local media have compared the case to the collapse of the UK's Barings Bank in 1995, when Singapore-based trader Nick Leeson ran up nearly US$2 billion in losses in market gambles.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
MANAGING DIFFERENCES: In a meeting days after the US president signed a massive foreign aid bill, Antony Blinken raised concerns with the Chinese president about Taiwan US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday met with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and senior Chinese officials, stressing the importance of “responsibly managing” the differences between the US and China as the two sides butt heads over a number of contentious bilateral, regional and global issues, including Taiwan and the South China Sea. Talks between the two sides have increased over the past few months, even as differences have grown. Blinken said he raised concerns with Xi about Taiwan and the South China Sea, along with China’s support for Russia and its invasion of Ukraine, as well as other issues
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B