Singapore has always been known for cutting through as much red tape as possible and in a new development, it has emerged that the country is going standardize the terms pertaining to project finance documents. Indranee Rajah, the Minister at the Prime Minister’s Office in Singapore stated that the country is currently working on ways to standardize as much as 50% of the terms in project finance documents in the coming 12 months. As everyone knows, foreign investment is the most important thing when it comes to the building of infrastructural projects in the country. If the standardization does happen, then the country would automatically become far more investible and bankable at one go.
While speaking at the Asia Infrastructure Forum, Indranee spoke about the sort of investment that is necessary for the infrastructure space in Asia. She said,
Few governments have resources to fund fully from their budgets, and developing Asia needs US$51 trillion (S$70.6 trillion) in infrastructure investment through 2040 to maintain its current growth momentum.
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The government of Singapore has deployed the newly formed government agency named Infrastructure Asia to work on the whole thing. In addition to that, legal experts are also working on the project in order to frame the standardized document. At this point in time, the government is looking forward to standardizing only 50% of the documents. The rest of it is going to be project-specific and hence customizable from project to project basis.
Indranee Rajah added,
We hope this will contribute to a more vibrant secondary market in infrastructure debt, and attract non-bank investors into this asset class.
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It goes without saying that this is a highly ambitious move from the government of Singapore and will come as music to the ears of big-ticket investors who are looking to invest in the country.
