Asian Legal Review

Singapore is officially in a political silly season – and elections are not even due until 2021. Speculation on who will replace Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong went into overdrive last week when the 65-year-old’s latest comments suggested the selection process within the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) was still going on and no obvious successor had emerged.  Tongues had already been wagging for months over the opacity of the so-called succession question…

ANALYSIS: Project companies should be putting contingency plans in place to deal with the compulsory liquidation of a contractor, as happened with Carillion.

ANALYSIS: Banks can be more confident about offering companies receivables finance after the UK’s Court of Appeal’s decision  (22-page / 411KB PDF) confirmed that restrictions on assignments in a company’s contracts should not be a barrier to receivables finance deals. 

Malaysia has barred controversial Bollywood film Padmaavat from being screened in theatres, the home ministry said on Friday, citing its negative portrayal of a Muslim ruler.
The film has already attracted protests in India, after groups critical of the project accused its director, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, of distorting history by portraying the Muslim ruler as the “lover” of Queen Padmavati of the Hindu Rajput warrior clan.
Last month, India’s top court allowed the film to be…

Standards committed to by three gambling operators on the terms and conditions applied to “bonus promotions” set a benchmark that the rest of industry must also meet, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and Gambling Commission have said.

The White House’s rejection of Victor Cha for the post of US ambassador to South Korea shows US President Donald Trump is leaning toward launching a “bloody nose” preventive strike against North Korea to force the reclusive country back to the negotiating table, analysts said. 
The Trump administration abandoned Cha – a former director for Asian affairs in the White House’s National Security Council and a top adviser for Korean affairs under former US…

The government’s main piece of legislation on withdrawal from the European Union has cleared its first hurdle in the House of Lords.

Two Indonesian men arrested for shooting an orangutan multiple times and then decapitating it before tossing the corpse into a river, have told investigators they acted in self-defence, police said on Thursday.
The suspects, both rubber plantation workers on the island of Borneo, admitted they killed the critically endangered male Bornean orangutan whose headless body was found last month.
Its hair was burned off its body which was riddled with at least 17 bullet wounds.
Pictures of the…

Riding a tsunami of moral conservatism and anti-gay prejudice, Indonesia’s Islamic political parties appear on the cusp of a major victory: outlawing all sex outside marriage.
Revisions to Indonesia’s criminal code being considered by Parliament would allow prison sentences of up to five years for sex between unmarried people. Those changes would also criminalise gay sex, the bugbear of Indonesia’s Islamic and secular political parties.
Rights groups and legal experts fear a…

The UK would be expected to apply EU law “as if it were a member state” during any post-Brexit transition period, EU leaders have said.