Getting your Singapore government grant approved is the easy part. The harder part — and the part that determines whether your grant actually pays out — is the post-approval phase: project execution, milestone tracking, claim submission, audit, and disbursement. This is where many SMEs stumble, and where claims get rejected, delayed, or partially clawed back. [...]
Running an e-commerce business in Singapore — whether you sell physical goods, digital services, or operate as an online marketplace — sits at the intersection of three regulatory regimes that did not exist in their current form a decade ago: corporate tax under the Income Tax Act 1947, GST under the Goods and Services Tax [...]
For mature foreign companies eyeing Singapore as their long-term operating base, the inward re-domiciliation regime is one of the most underused tools in the corporate toolkit. Introduced by the Companies (Amendment) Act 2017 and operative from 11 October 2017, Singapore's inward re-domiciliation regime allows a qualifying foreign corporate entity to transfer its registration to Singapore [...]
If you are buying or selling a Singapore private company, the smoothness of that exit will often turn on two unassuming clauses tucked into the shareholders' agreement: drag-along and tag-along rights. They look technical. They feel like boilerplate. But they decide whether a majority owner can deliver 100% of the equity to a buyer, and [...]
Singapore's food and beverage (F&B) sector is one of the most heavily regulated parts of the Singapore SME landscape. A typical café, restaurant, or central kitchen has obligations spread across at least five regulators — the Singapore Food Agency (SFA), the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA), the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (IRAS), the [...]
Singapore's inward re-domiciliation regime, introduced in October 2017 through Section 358B of the Companies Act 1967, allows a foreign company to transfer its place of registration to Singapore — keeping the same legal entity, the same contracts, the same employees, and the same banking relationships, but operating under Singapore corporate law from the date of [...]
Drag-along rights are one of the most consequential clauses in a Singapore shareholders' agreement. They give a defined majority of shareholders the power to compel — to "drag" — minority shareholders into selling their shares on the same terms when a third-party buyer wants to acquire the entire company. Without one, even a single dissenting [...]
Singapore offers two parallel tax-exemption schemes for fund vehicles managed by family offices: Section 13O and Section 13U of the Income Tax Act 1947. Both schemes shelter "specified income" derived from "designated investments" from Singapore tax — but they target different sizes of family wealth and impose meaningfully different conditions on assets, hiring, spending, and [...]
Drag-along rights are one of the most consequential — and most contentious — provisions in a Singapore shareholders' agreement. They allow a majority shareholder, on the sale of the company, to compel minority shareholders to sell their shares on the same terms. For the majority, this is a clean exit mechanism. For the minority, it [...]
Running payroll in Singapore looks simple on the surface — there is no employee income tax to withhold, no equivalent of pay-as-you-earn, and IRAS does not collect tax monthly. But Singapore has its own discipline: monthly Central Provident Fund (CPF) contributions, monthly Skills Development Levy (SDL), monthly Foreign Worker Levy (FWL) where applicable, annual income [...]