Standard Chartered Bank

Standard Chartered Bank, formed in 1969 by the merger of two old banks Standard and Chartered, is something of a curiosity: though its headquarter building is in London and its shares are listed on the stock exchange there (as well as HK), it is not really a British bank, since its business presence in UK itself is small (compared to Barclays, Lloyds, Royal Bank of Scotland, or even HKBank); if you have to single out one location particularly important to its operation, this would probably be HK, where it is a "note issuing bank",  

i.e., it prints currency notes that circulate in HK as legal tender, in company with two other banks, HKBC and Bank of China (the HK government issues coins, not paper currencies; the three banks get authorizations to issue X dollars of HK currency by making an equivalent deposit in the HK Government Exchange Fund, which is one of the main public financial reserves of HK), but it is basically an international operation without an individual locational "base".

Currently, its largest shareholder is Temasek the Singapore government investment fund, which acquired part of its stake from the estate of Khoo Teck Puat, a local tycoon with a colourful history. Khoo, after undergoing legal problems in Malaysia and Brunei over multiple decades, was one of the three white knights that came to the rescue of Standard Chartered Bank in 1986 when Lloyds tried to take it over; the other two, Holmes Acourt of Australia (originally South African) and Sir YK Pao of HK (a shipping magnate also investing in hotels and real estate) soon left the scene, but Khoo continued to hold the stake and when he died in 2004, his estate was found to include a 11.5% shareholding of the bank. At the same time, he was found to have secretely exceeded shareholding limits of several listed companies in violation of stock exchange rules, putting his estate into legal jeopardy. In 2006 Temasek, which already had some shareholdings in the bank, bought Khoo's stake, making itself the largest shareholder.

It is not clear whether Temasek desires to run Standard Chartered as it runs its various subsidiaries and associate companies; in any case, there is a legal obstacle in the event of it wishing to have majority control: HK Monetary Authority would discontinue SCB's note issuing function if it has a foreign majority owner. It is not so clear whether the same applies to majority board membership or control over remuneration and appointment committees. In any case, so far Temasek has made no move in such directions.

The joker in the pack, however, is the issue of bank merger in Singapore: since the takeover of Overseas Union Bank by United Overseas Bank (beating off an attempt from Development Bank of Singapore), Singapore has been down to three local banks - the third one being Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation. There have been hints that further mergers would be desirable, to create local banks large enough to compete with overseas banks like Citicorp. However, the three remaining banks each has unique historical traditions and operating philosophies, and getting together might pose considerable difficulties, which might negate the supposed advantages of increased size.

As Temasek already has substantial stakes in both DBS and SCB, it actually makes sense to merge these two; the result would be something like HKBank, which has a strong base in HK, but also significant presence internationally - in fact it calls itself "the world's local bank" in its ads; a DBS/SCB merged entity would have a strong base in Singapore to anchor the widespread internatonal operation. The Temasek shareholding % of such an entity would be similar to its current % in the two units, but its % would dwarf that of any other shareholder.

http://www.businesstimes.com.sg/sub/news/story/0,4574,414185,00.html?

!this caught my eye; there is a brief mention of SCB at the end so I put it here, but I was interested in another point: it seems CitiBank has split the management of Asia Pacific into two parts, South/Southeast Asia managed from Singapore and North Asia managed from HK; why not say so officially? maybe I am ignorant about such things, but I dont see how subordinates managing different countries in each region would report to  two people, with separate regions to manage, and have them jointly make decisions in reply to each subordinate