Second hotel chef jailed for receiving $200000 in bribes from supplier

A former master chef at Goodwood Park Hotel became the second chef to be jailed for corruption. Tan Ah Teng, 46, was sentenced to four months in prison on Friday.

He had pleaded guilty to receiving nearly $200,000 in bribes between January 2007 and August 2009 from seafood supplier Tay Ee Tiong, the sole proprietor of Wealthy Seafood Product and Enterprise.

A dozen other corrupt chefs bribed by Tay have been dealt with. Last October, Chik Ka Chung, 48, former executive chef of Wan Hao restaurant in the Marriott Hotel, was sentenced to four months’ jail for receiving $177,704 in bribes.

The others were fined as in the case of Chung Yiu Ming, 54, from the Sheraton Towers Singapore hotel. He was fined $17,000 for taking bribes of $21,897 from July 2007 to April 2009.

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Second hotel chef jailed for receiving $200000 in bribes from supplier

SingTel Prefers Mobile in Seeking Myanmar Access

Singapore Telecommunications Ltd.,
Southeast Asia’s biggest phone company, wants to focus on
wireless services in Myanmar as it vies for the right to operate
in one of the world’s last untapped mobile markets.

SingTel sent in its expression of interest for a phone
license in the nation last month and is awaiting further details
on the bidding process and terms of the permit, Chief Executive
Officer Chua Sock Koong said in a Bloomberg Television interview
with Haslinda Amin yesterday.

“Looking at the experience in other emerging markets, the
mobile solution appears to be a more cost effective, a faster
solution to provide communications infrastructure to the masses,
particularly in the rural areas, very quickly,” she said.
“While the market potential is very attractive, we would need
to understand what the terms of the license issuance would be.”

SingTel, which owns stakes in the biggest mobile-phone
companies in Asian emerging markets including Thailand,
Indonesia and India, is seeking a foothold in a nation where
only 9 percent of the country’s 64 million people have handsets.
The nation’s fixed-line penetration rate is about 1 percent, the
government said last month.

The nation wants to boost telecommunications coverage to as
much as 80 percent of the country by 2016, the government said
last month. That’s up from 5.44 million mobile-phone subscribers
as of December. In SingTel’s home base in Singapore, there are
more subscriptions than people.

SingTel said it will jointly bid with Myanmar partners.

‘Quite Exponential’

“The growth is going to be quite exponential, looking at
how Asians use mobile phones,” said Carey Wong, a Singapore-
based analyst at OCBC Investment Research Pte. “The challenge
is consumer education. Initial sales won’t be great but once it
takes off, it’s a developing market for them.”

Still, SingTel faces competition for the two Myanmar
licenses the government plans to award by June. Malaysia’s
Axiata Group Bhd., Singapore’s ST Telemedia Pte and Norway’s
Telenor ASA were among phone operators that indicated their
interest in the licenses.

For mobile operators, developing a network in Myanmar would
require “almost building from scratch” with base stations and
other infrastructure, said Sachin Gupta, a Singapore-based
senior analyst at Nomura Holdings Inc. Gupta’s team was ranked
first for telecommunications research in Asia by Institutional
Investor last year.

Profit Decline

SingTel said yesterday third-quarter profit fell 8.3
percent on charges from its Australia and Philippine businesses,
as well as a stronger Singapore dollar that eroded earnings from
its regional operations.

The company’s shares fell 1.4 percent to S$3.45 as of 12:07
p.m. in Singapore trading, the lowest since Jan. 28. That pared
the gain in the past year to 12 percent, compared with the 8.8
percent increase in Singapore’s benchmark Straits Times Index.

“Singapore is already a mature market, Australia is even
more so,” Wong at OCBC said. “If they can get into an untapped
market like Myanmar, that will do wonders.”

For much of the past decade, mobile phones have been out of
reach for most Myanmar consumers. When first introduced in 2001,
the cost of activating a phone using the global system for
mobile communications standard, or GSM, cost about 4.5 million
kyat ($5,221). The price has fallen to about 200,000 kyat for a
GSM chip, according to prices at phone vendors in Yangon.

Phone Affordability

Kyaw Min Tun, who earns about 250,000 kyat a month driving
a taxi in Yangon, said prices would have to fall to 50,000 kyat
before he could buy a mobile phone for his wife. The father of
three, who bought a phone last year when chip activation prices
were reduced, said the government should earn more from usage
fees rather than on the price of the chip to make cellular
phones more affordable.

For SingTel’s Chua, 55, venturing into Myanmar would add to
her overseas footprint that includes Australia’s second-biggest
phone company and stakes in six mobile operators.

“Myanmar is a market that a lot of operators are looking
at,” she said. There’s “certainly a lot of potential. How
attractive an investment in the telecoms industry is, would
depend on, to a large extent, the regulatory environment.”

To contact the reporters on this story:
Sharon Chen in Singapore at
schen462@bloomberg.net;
Kyaw Thu in Bangkok at
kthu1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Stephanie Phang at
sphang@bloomberg.net

SingTel Prefers Mobile in Seeking Myanmar Access

Concorde Hotel Singapore Appoints New Assistant Training Manager - eTravelBlackboard

Concorde Hotel Singapore today announced the appointment of Mr Frank Pang as the Hotel’s Assistant Training Manager, responsible for the Hotel’s Training and Development functions, reporting to the Director of Training and Development.

Frank is tasked with managing the delivery of the Hotel’s training programmes as well as building a committed and motivated team of hosts at Concorde Hotel Singapore.

“We’re pleased to welcome Frank to our team. He will be working closely with our Director of Training and Development, to provide our hosts with the necessary skills to meet and exceed the business goals of the hotel,” said Mr. Leo Llambi, General Manager of Concorde Hotel Singapore.

Prior to assuming his position at Concorde Hotel Singapore, Frank was with Marina Bay Sands Pte Ltd. With more than 5 years of training experience in the Hospitality industry, his efforts will help us attain greater operational excellence at Concorde Hotel Singapore.

Concorde Hotel Singapore Appoints New Assistant Training Manager - eTravelBlackboard

Ponzi Schemes Built on People Always Crash Too

Singaporeans are raring to do
something extraordinary: protest.

That might not seem like a big deal with the Arab Spring
uprisings; Chinese journalists taking to the streets; and
thousands of typically docile Japanese rallying against
government policies. But tropical Singapore is the land of quiet
brooding, where mass street demonstrations are as common as
snowstorms.

What has people so riled up? Well, people. The impetus for
the Feb. 16 march is a report that the tiny island’s population
may rise by as much as 30 percent to 6.9 million by 2030. This
seems to be the government’s answer to the question of how to
sustain prosperity in one of the most crowded and expensive
cities in the world.

The signs of overcrowding and urban stress are palpable to
any visitor. Prices are surging, public services in a nation
famed for nanny-state tendencies are slipping and some of the
finest infrastructure anywhere is bucking under the strain.
Locals blame the influx of immigrants, which Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s ruling party touts as one key to Singapore’s
success in the years to come.

The city-state, with about half the area of New York City,
has 3.3 million citizens and 2 million foreign residents, many
of whom have contributed greatly to Singapore’s growth in
finance and construction. Yet complaints that overseas workers
deprive locals of jobs and drive up housing prices fill the air.
Singapore is the third-most-expensive Asian city and ranks as
the sixth most costly in the world, according to an Economist
Intelligence Unit ranking of 131 cities.

Case Study

Singapore may well serve as a case study for what happens
when leaders try to offset slowing economic growth with
immigration and increased birth rates. There are lessons that
Japan or Italy would do well to study. All of it is turning into
a political liability for Lee, the son of Lee Kuan Yew, who is
regarded as the father of modern Singapore.

The erosion in his party’s popularity is accelerating after
the release Jan. 29 of a white paper that contained the 6.9
million figure, which it calls a projection, not a goal. Lee
Hsien Loong has since said the number of people will be
“significantly” lower than the report suggests. Will
Singaporeans buy that?

“The new population policy is anti-Singaporean and it
threatens our existence and livelihoods,” says Gilbert Goh, 51,
an advocate for unemployed citizens and an organizer of a
protest planned for this week.

Sadly, some of the rants one reads in the media and online
veer toward xenophobia. If Singaporeans are so livid, they
should stop supporting Lee’s party. After all, isn’t the
government, by seeking to import more human capital, telling its
own people that they lack the skills to compete? Anyone who
doubts Singapore is serious only has to look at accelerating
efforts to reclaim land from the sea for development, giving the
city the room for population growth.

The real question, as public angst rises, is whether the
opposition is justified. Former United Nations demographer
Joseph Chamie says it is. To Chamie, the view that it’s almost
always better to have more and more people is the human
equivalent of what Bernard Madoff did with money, something he
calls “Ponzi demography.”

The human-pyramid scheme works like this: Population
growth, either through births or immigration, boosts demand for
goods and services, increases borrowing, boosts tax revenue and
adds to corporate profits. Everything seems grand and leaders
take a bow. It’s a bubble, though, and it eventually bursts when
population growth stalls. Incomes top out, high debt crushes
consumption and investment, the need for public assistance
rises, environmental degradation increases and angry people take
to the streets.

Public Pays

As households are left to pick up the tab once Ponzi
demography runs its course, government leaders issue dire
warnings about economic decline if the flow of fresh talent
stops. This will sound familiar to Singaporeans as Lee’s
People’s Action Party sketches out a dystopian future without
adding wealthy bankers and low-income workers to the nation’s
ranks.

Singapore needs to find another way. The era of easy growth
is over. Just as economies such as Japan and South Korea are
seeing the limits of their export-led models, Singapore’s
formula has run its course. Raising the productivity of its
current workforce would be more potent for a developed, open
economy looking to compete in a region dominated by the cheap
labor and manufacturing of China and India. Singapore should
focus as much energy on incentives for its existing residents to
innovate and start new businesses as on adding more bodies.

Not only is Singapore toying with liberalized immigration,
it’s also revving up a campaign to persuade Singaporeans to wed
younger and reproduce. It is an odd push for Lee. Four decades
ago, concern about overpopulation prompted his father to urge a
delay in nuptials and to have smaller families. Today, amid a
birthrate of about 1.3 children per woman, efforts to encourage
bigger families border on the offensive. Just check a new
website, “Hey Baby.”

Singapore’s addiction to population growth sends a simple
and disconcerting message: The country has run out of ideas to
increase economic vitality, aside from encouraging people to
procreate or immigrate. Ponzi demography, indeed.

(William Pesek is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions
expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this article:
William Pesek in Singapore at
wpesek@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this article:
James Greiff at jgreiff@bloomberg.net

Ponzi Schemes Built on People Always Crash Too