Brief Biodata

Michael Ewing-Chow specialises in corporate law and world trade law. He has a First Class Honours degree from the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore (NUS) where he received the Allen & Gledhill Scholarship and Kwa Gek Choo Scholarship. He also took prizes in Company Law, Banking Law and Jurisprudence. In 1994, he was fortunate to be a part of the student team that represented NUS and won the Jessup International Law Competition.

After graduation, he worked in the corporate department of Allen & Gledhill before rejoining NUS where he was awarded the NUS-Overseas Graduate Scholarship to pursue a postgraduate degree at Harvard Law School.

Upon returning from Harvard, he, with some colleagues, started the first World Trade Law course at NUS and became involved in negotiations for Singapore's early free trade agreements (FTAs). He has been a consultant to Singapore Ministry of Trade and Industry, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Finance as well as the World Bank and the WTO. Michael has also been involved in the building of trade law capacity of government officials in Asia and Latin America.

On the corporate side, he has also assisted the Company Law Reform and Frameworks Committee which was tasked in 2001 with a major overhaul of corporate law in Singapore. In 2008, he was also appointed to a Working Group of the Steering Committee for the review of the Singapore Companies Act.

He has written and published articles on corporate governance, trade law and investment law with a particular focus on FTAs. He has been an editor of the Singapore Year Book of International Law (SYBIL) and its predecessor, the Singapore Journal of International and Comparative Law (SJICL) as well as the Singapore Law Reports (Reissue) series.

He volunteers his time with various Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) such as the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) Singapore and is a co-founder of aidha, an NGO which provides financial education and microfinance opportunities for domestic migrant workers and for which he was awarded the NUS BINGO Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award 2007. Michael was also awarded in 2007 the Teaching Excellence Award.