Dhanabalan had put on record his objection to quarterly reporting the week before, shortly after the government had agreed to require locally listed companies to adopt the practice from January 2003. “We seem to have tilted in favour of traders in stocks, rather than investors in stocks,” Dhanabalan had complained in a speech that was widely reported at the time.
SINGAPORE (June 10): One of the last things we used to do before closing each issue of The Edge Singapore in our early days was hammer out a little column called “Behind the Stories”. As its name suggests, its purpose was to explain why we had pursued the key stories in our pages in any given week, and provide some additional context and insight for which there might not have been room in the stories themselves.
On one particularly hectic closing night almost 17 years ago, I remember having to dictate significant portions of the column to our copy-editing desk in Kuala Lumpur over the phone. The opening sentence of the column that week (Issue 36, Nov 4, 2002) read: “It’s reporting season again — whether Temasek chairman S Dhanabalan likes it or not.”
