Commodity giants' Singapore trading hubs under fire in tax probes

SINGAPORE: The Singapore trading hubs of the world's largest commodity companies are coming under scrutiny from the governments of some resource-producing countries who say they suspect they are using units in the Southeast Asian financial centre to avoid tax.

Some of the world's largest oil, mining and soft commodity companies book billions of dollars of revenue in the tiny island state every year, where tax rates can be very low, which is perfectly legal unless they deliberately underprice group transactions so as to shift profit there from units in other countries.