Golden Agri-Resources

The company was among seven listed firms questioned by SGX, following concerns raised by Senior Minister Kay Shanmugam.

The other six, including Wilmar and Golden Agri Resources, have since issued statements.

TSH, which has a secondary listing in Singapore, has not published a response as of 6pm yesterday.

Under SGX rules, companies with secondary listings must publish announcements made in their home markets on the exchange's website.

But one of the interesting wrinkles here is that a lot of the companies are headquartered in Singapore itself.

Golden Agri Resources, Wilmar International, Alam International, Royal Golden Eagle, These are some of the big players in the Indonesian palm oil plantation sector.

Some of them have quite close links to the pulp and paper industry as well.

And most of them for decades now have been headquartered in Singapore.

Indonesian officials said, well, we're not going to give people up to you to interview because you're trying to interfere in our domestic affairs.

As it happened, four of the companies in question were actually quite close suppliers to APP, which is owned by the company.

Wijaja Family, which is a family of Indonesian tycoons whose other main business, Golden Agri Resources, is one of the big Indonesian palm oil companies listed in Singapore.

So again, it was this transferring of responsibility.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, but it is a complicated thing, like, right? I mean, uh, the Wilmar International, Golden Agri, they were also amongst those Singapore-listed firms that, that addressed their involvement in the ongoing fires, uh, right?

Mm.

But they literally said that, yeah, uh, they have no burning policies in place.

Where warranted, Singapore will take action under its Transboundary Haste Pollution Act and also explore joint action with other countries.

At the last check, First Resources shares fell by as much as 9.1%, Bumitama Agriculture down by about 7.5% and Golden Agri Resources down by as much as 7%.

A Straits Times report cited a recent Greenpeace investigation which named First Resources and Bumitama Agriamang entities with concession areas registering haze source points.

First Resources also defended itself yesterday stating that the fires detected within its Indonesian palm oil concessions were largely caused by external blazes spreading across its boundary and the company also attributed the elevated fire risk in West Kalimantan to a severe El Nino-induced drought.