According to the book, ‘Social Insecurity in the New Millennium’ by Linda Low and Aw Tar Choon, “the CPF became a de facto housing financier since the Housing and Development Board (HDB) was a heavy user of development funds”. It went on further to explain that, “In the initial years, before the government built up budgetary surpluses, it borrowed funds from the CPF for its development expenditure budget, one important user being the HDB.” Indeed, according to the Innovation Policies in Singapore, and Applicability to New Zealand report, it also reaffirmed that, “The single largest item in the 1961-64 State Development Plan, and hence indirect beneficiary of CPF funds, was housing,” and that in this “CPF-HDB nexus”, “The CPF financed Singapore’s public housing program (where) In the 1960s and 1970s, the HDB was the largest borrower from the government’s development fund.” Low and Aw also explained that, “The other way the CPF functions as a financing agent is when CPF members use their CPF savings to purchase HDB housing”. And how does this become problematic? You can see that the net flow in one year in this “CPF-HDB” nexus is that there is still a higher net inflow into HDB, where Singaporeans would lose more of our CPF into the HDB. Thus in short, it is clear that Singaporeans’ CPF is invested in the HDB. Now, why is this important? According to Surbana, “In July 2003, HDB’s Building and Development Division was corporatised as HDB Corporation Pte Ltd (HDBCorp) in a bid to export Singapore’s decades of urbanisation expertise and experience to other countries… A year later, the potential of HDB Corp was evident in its acquisition by Temasek Holdings, the Singapore Government’s investment vehicle and in 2005, the company was rebranded as Surbana Corporation Pte Ltd.” Also, “In April 2011, CapitaLand, one of the largest real estate developers in Singapore, acquired a 40% stake in Surbana, with the rest held by Temasek Holdings. Two years later, Surbana underwent a restructure and its township development arm, Surbana Land was integrated with CapitaLand China, leaving its consultancy as the core business for Surbana.” Today, Surbana calls itself “A Singapore MNC, Temasek-Linked company” and CapitaLand is one of the major investments of Temasek Holdings. By now, it would be clear to any reader that Singaporeans’ CPF was indeed invested in the HDB, which corporatised an arm, that was then absorbed into Temasek Holdings. So, is the CPF invested in Temasek Holdings? And when the HDB was corporatised and acquired by Temasek Holdings and CapitaLand, was Singaporeans’ CPF returned to Singaporeans, or were the earnings shared with Singaporeans?
Posted on: Thu, 24 Jul 2014 10:15:00 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015