More than 20 banks are fighting to recover billions of dollars in loans to the fabled trader after wrong-way bets on Covid-19’s impact on oil prices unfurled hidden losses and alleged frauds. The fallout is still reverberating across global markets, prompting financial institutions to reassess their exposure and shaking out large tracts of the often opaque US$4 trillion oil-trading industry.
Hin Leong Trading (Pte.) Ltd, under judicial managers from PricewaterhouseCoopers, has made an application to freeze assets, shares and funds held by its founder Lim Oon Kuin and his two children as efforts to recoup US$3.5 billion ($4.61 billion) of debt from the collapsed oil trader continue.
The Singapore-based company is seeking to block the sale of any private properties and removal of assets from the city state among other measures, court filings show. The application was motivated by a real risk of asset dissipation, even as its judicial managers made progress with the sale of assets such as Universal Terminal.
