Description

A fundamental principle of corporations law is that a company is not allowed to repurchase its own shares as doing so may potentially lead to misuse and depletion of a company’s capital and assets to the detriment of its creditors and shareholders. Nevertheless, share buy-back rules have been relaxed in recent years to allow companies to buy back their shares, subject to certain safeguards, with a view to maintaining a careful balance between upholding the capital maintenance rules and commercial practicality. For listed companies engaging in share buy-backs, in addition to observing the letter as well as the spirit of corporation laws, regard has to be given to securities laws that protect the interests of investors at large. Listed companies should be cautious not to rubber stamp share buy-back activities, especially in these uncertain times caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In this pracademic seminar, our speakers will provide an overview of the share buy-back regime for both listed and unlisted companies in Singapore and highlight some practical considerations that a corporation should take note of before adopting or continuing with a share buy-back scheme, in order to avoid falling foul of corporations and securities laws or inviting unnecessary scrutiny of its share buy-back activities.

About The Speakers
Cynthia Goh is a Partner with the Mergers & Acquisitions and Capital Markets practice at Rajah & Tann Singapore. She has more than twenty years of experience in mergers and acquisitions, schemes of arrangement, reverse takeovers, divestments, corporate finance, capital markets and general corporate work. She has been consistently listed as one of Asia’s leading lawyers in the area of Mergers & Acquisitions by Asialaw. She has also been cited by the The Legal 500 Asia Pacific as having “experience and standing in the market”, and praised for providing “consistently sound advice”. She has been selected by her peers for inclusion in Best Lawyers since 2013 for her work in Mergers & Acquisitions. Cynthia has also been named in
Who’s Who Legal for her work in M&A and Governance since 2017.
Hans has taught at the Faculty of Law, NUS, since 1990, and is Director of the EW Barker Centre for Law and Business He has published widely in international and local journals, and has written or co-written books on company law, securities regulation and trust law. He is also a contributor to Halsbury’s Laws of Singapore on contract law and to Palmer’s Company Law (Geoffrey Morse ed). He was previously seconded to the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Ministry of Law. He is presently
serving on the Securities Industry Council, is Deputy Chairman of the SGX Listing Advisory Committee, and a consultant with TSMP Law Corporation. He has been a visiting professor at National Taiwan University, Auckland and Shanghai’s ECUPL and a visiting scholar at Stanford and Melbourne. He recently delivered public lectures at the law schools of NTU, Tsinghua, Zhejiang and West Bengal NUJS.