Europe trading firm's comeback in Singapore

Singapore

CHINA may be a larger market for gold, but Singapore as a free market is more attractive for foreign players, in the view of Europe's largest trading firm.

"Singapore is more free market and is less governed than China," said Raphael Scherer, chief international officer of Degussa Goldhandel. "They've started doing the free trade zone, but the scale is so small it's not attractive for us . . . It seems to me that more of the music is playing in Singapore now for us."

The Frankfurt-headquartered firm, with a turnover of about 1.3 billion euros (S$2.109 billion) last year, set up its first office outside Europe, here three weeks ago. This marks a comeback for the firm, which set up the first refinery here in the 1980s, albeit in a different form. The refinery had wound up in 1998. The well-known brand was brought back into the market in 2011 after Degussa Goldhandel, a private trading …