Opening Remarks by Minister Lim Hng Kiang at the India Infrastructure Forum at Raffles Hotel, Casuarina Suite B

Honourable Kamal Nath, Minister of Urban Development of India

Mr Chew Choon Seng, Chairman of Singapore Exchange

Mr Magnus Böcker, CEO of Singapore Exchange

Distinguished guests,

Ladies and gentlemen,

1.            Good morning. I am happy to join you this morning at the India Infrastructure Forum.

2.            This Forum is a good platform for policy makers, financial institutions and infrastructure companies to learn about investment opportunities and industry trends in India. Your presence here today underscores Singapore’s growing role in helping to match the infrastructure investment opportunities in emerging markets with strong corporate and investor interest in such opportunities.

3.            Indeed, capital inflows into emerging market economies rebounded strongly after the global financial crisis. According to some estimates, about US$1.5 trillion in foreign capital went into emerging markets in 2012. These flows are partly due to institutional investors’ hunt for yield, but they also reflect a shift in growth prospects from the advanced to the emerging markets in the longer term. While funds have been volatile more recently, the need for infrastructural development, which is a long term development, remains.

4.            When it comes to raising capital for infrastructure projects in emerging markets, Singapore offers several key advantages. We have a well-developed ecosystem comprising key players such as financial institutions, multilateral development institutions and infrastructure engineering specialists.

5.            Where financial institutions are concerned, Clifford Capital was recently established and its shareholders consist of DBS, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, Manulife, Prudential and Temasek. It aims to provide tailored project finance products and solutions specifically in support of Singapore-based companies engaged in overseas projects. In addition, global banks such as Standard Chartered, Mizuho, ING and DBS have their Asia Pacific project finance desks located in Singapore. About 60% of cross-border project finance in ASEAN is also lead-managed from here.

6.            As for multilateral development institutions, Singapore and the World Bank established the World Bank-Singapore Urban Hub partnership in 2009 to help developing countries learn from Singapore’s experience and structure their infrastructure projects to be commercially viable. The partnership has also resulted in the setting up of the Infrastructure Finance Centre of Excellence (IFCOE) in 2010. It provides capacity-building and technical assistance to countries in our region to increase the success of their public-private partnership (PPP) projects. And just two months ago, IE Singapore and the Asian Development Bank launched a public-private partnership (PPP) initiative that works with governments in the region to structure infrastructure projects and explore ASEAN’s capital markets to finance them.

7.            Singapore also has a robust framework to support the infrastructure financing activities of all the players in our ecosystem. We have put in place a Business Trust Framework to allow asset owners to recycle their capital into new projects via the equity market by attracting new private capital and retaining control of the assets (through a trustee manager) at the same time. For example, India’s Fortis Healthcare’s Religare Health Trust used Singapore’s Business Trust Framework to raise some S$500 million.

CONCLUSION

8.            Financial institutions and the public sector play complementary roles in developing a country’s infrastructure. Conferences such as this are an excellent way of bringing together the relevant stakeholders to identify potential areas of collaboration. On that note, I look forward to a fruitful exchange of ideas later today. Thank you.