Singapore has fined commodities business Noble Group S$12.6mn ($9.1mn) for publishing “misleading information” in its financial statements, following an investigation that has taken almost four years to complete.

The announcement by the city state’s accounting authority concludes its probe of a high-profile accounting scandal that brought Noble to the brink of collapse. It also flagged “stern warnings” given to two unnamed former directors of the group.

Noble’s near-collapse, from a business worth more than $6bn that had hoped to emulate industry giant Glencore, was precipitated by a series of highly critical reports on its accounting practices published in 2015 by short seller Iceberg Research.

By 2018, it had been forced into a painful debt-for-equity swap and a delisting, and it sold off a number of key assets to help it survive. The saga also dented Singapore’s reputation as a commodities trading hub.

The fine, equivalent to 0.4 per cent of Noble’s reported revenues in 2020, was criticised by Iceberg. “A minor fine for a major [scandal],” it wrote on Twitter.

The improper accounting at Noble is one of a series of scandals in recent years that have raised questions about regulation in Singapore, which has sought to attract multinationals while promoting its strong “rule of law”.

A number of Singapore-based commodities groups have been at the centre of scandals in recent years, including Noble Group, Agritrade International, Hin Leong Trading, ZenRock Commodities Trading and Petro-Diamond Singapore.

Some have received hefty fines and executives have faced jail time. The billionaire founder of Hin Leong, Lim Oon Kuin, in 2020 confessed to hiding $800mn in losses at the Singapore-based oil trading firm he founded. Singapore police filed more than 100 charges against Lim last year while a former director and operations executive of ZenRock were charged last month with more than $105mn worth of dishonesty offences.

The problems make the case for a stronger regulatory framework and oversight of trading houses in Singapore’s small, open economy say analysts. But Nirgunan Tiruchelvam, an analyst at Tellimer, said they did not seem to have dented corporate enthusiasm for Singapore.

“Singapore provides these companies with tax haven status and access to financiers, which these businesses are so dependent on,” he said.

“Singapore’s stock exchange [lost] credibility a long time ago,” wrote Iceberg. “The lack of enforcement means even Singapore companies prefer to list elsewhere.”

Loo Siew Yee, assistant managing director of the policy, payments and financial crime group at the Monetary Authority of Singapore, said that measures taken by the authorities against Noble “demonstrates that MAS takes breaches of disclosure obligations seriously and will take firm action against persons found to have fallen short”.

Noble said it was pleased the investigation had been concluded, adding that its commodity trading business had been under new ownership and management since December 2018 and “has focused on the highest standards of corporate governance, reporting and transparency since then”.

Singapore’s biggest bank plans to grow its cryptocurrency and digital assets business despite the crypto bear market, saying it wants to expand its digital exchange and offer services to more of its 300,000 wealthy clients in Asia.

Piyush Gupta, chief executive of DBS since 2009, said the crypto market downturn proved that established and regulated financial institutions, rather than just start-ups, should be offering products such as digital asset trading for retail investors.

The bank’s brokerage arm last year received a cryptocurrency licence from the Monetary Authority of Singapore, allowing its institutional and wealthy clients access to its DBS Digital Exchange by invitation.

Gupta said the bank has less than 1,000 members on the exchange but would soon offer the service to 300,000 of its wealthy clients across Asia including private banks, accredited investors, other exchanges and funds through its DBS mobile banking app.

The app would make the process less clunky and quicker for clients in addition to allowing DBS to offer it to more customers, he said. DBS had total assets of S$686bn (US$488bn) as of December 2021.

The former Citibank executive, who has served in senior banking roles across Asia, said DBS had to support Singapore’s push into cutting-edge financial technology. “People look to us to be a pioneer in the space and to continue to push boundaries,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times.

The plans from DBS, in which state investment group Temasek holds a stake of just under 30 per cent, come as Singapore grapples with its messaging over its attempt to be a crypto hub. The city-state, whose economy is reliant on financial services and trading, believes it must innovate to remain relevant.

But this year’s collapse of several high-profile crypto groups, including Singapore-based Three Arrows and Terraform Labs, in addition to plummeting valuations globally has prompted questions over MAS’s strategy.

In response, MAS managing director Ravi Menon said last week that the regulator would take steps to protect retail investors while affirming the city’s digital asset strategy.

Gupta described the challenges facing the country’s regulators. “On the one hand, we want to be a global crypto hub. On the other hand, we’re also very worried about our domestic population getting burned with this speculative asset class,” he said.

Gupta said losses suffered by retail investors in the crypto crash underscored the importance of more established financial institutions offering digital assets services. The total number of trades on DBS Digital Exchange has more than doubled from April to the end of June, while the quantity of bitcoin bought on the exchange has risen nearly four times. Similarly, the quantity of ether, another popular token, has increased 65 per cent over the same period.

“We have been judicious about who we have brought on. My view is we can do this for retail investors but regulators don’t necessarily see it that way,” he said.

About $1bn had flowed out of DBS and into global crypto exchanges run by companies including Genesis and Binance before the bank launched its own exchange, Gupta said. Entrusting companies such as DBS, which could put in place “guardrails” and protections, would lead to “better outcomes”, he added.

“You might as well try and create frameworks and processes to make these sensibly available to everybody instead of having a regulated space and a cowboy space and let everybody go to the cowboy space.”

Analysts cautioned that no regulator can protect against market risk. “In truth, crypto is highly volatile and fundamentally it has to go down to people understanding the risk,” said Nizam Ismail, founder of Singapore-based Ethikom Consultancy, which advises companies on compliance, adding that plenty of banks had failed to do so.

Hypothetically, DBS could be safer for retail investors wanting to trade cryptocurrencies but it was hard to judge, he added.

“What we really need is some sort of check or driver’s licence to ensure [retail investors] understand the risks. That doesn’t exist,” said Zennon Kapron, director of Kapronasia, a financial technology research and consulting group. “Whether that comes from banks like DBS is another question.”