and Hin Leong is a homegrown oil trader in Singapore.

Hin Leong has also always been very secretive.

It's held by its founder Oon Kuin Lim,

his son and his daughter.

So very little is actually known about Hin Leong.

And we've also got this fallout

from the Singapore oil trader, Hin Leong.

Investigations started in April

after Hin Leong filed for bankruptcy protection.

It was revealed that Lim had asked the company

to hide nearly a billion dollars in losses

from speculating oil futures over the years.

So it all started when we heard that major banks

were pulling financing from the oil trader Hin Leong.

And at first, we were shocked to hear this information.

Hin Leong is such a big name

in the Asian oil-trading industry

and why were the banks unwilling to finance

Hin Leong any further.

All the answers only came to us much later.

My name is Alfred Cang.

I'm a senior reporter with Bloomberg News.

I'm Serene Cheong.

I'm a reporter at Bloomberg.

Serene and I and other colleagues in Singapore office

wrote the story about the collapse of Hin Leong,

one of the biggest independent oil traders in the world.

So Hin Leong is in the business

of what we call bunkering,

which is to supply shipping fuel to all the vessels

that come into the Singapore ports for refueling.

It's actually owned and founded by Lim Oon Kuin,

also known as OK Lim.

OK Lim was born in Fujian province of China.

He immigrated to Singapore in 1950s.

From the associates who've known OK Lim for decades,

OK Lim was described as a low-key, humble,

aggressive oil trader

and always honest to his origin.

OK Lim likes dining in a Singapore-based chain restaurant

which serves his homeland food.

He is also known as a keen poker player.

He started off as a one-man, one-truck business.

He would buy fuel from oil majors,

parcel it up into smaller volumes

and resell it to taxi companies, to bus companies

as well as to fishing boats.

OK Lim's business later developed

to involve a lot more of these tank trucks

and later on, it also developed to include

an entire fleet of vessels

that will actually work as an integrated supply system

to allow him to buy, float and sell fuel to customers

around the region.

Hin Leong actually developed

alongside the Singapore oil trading hub.

And as more and more boats came to Singapore

to dock and refuel,

Hin Leong grew because it was opportunistically

at the right place at the right time.

So different from stock-market trading,

where information are basically available publicly,

oil traders in the world rely on the information

private to a small group and find the business opportunity.

Our understanding of OK Lim

is that he is a trader with a very big appetite for risk.

He's also one that thrives in the very opaque

and secretive market of oil trading in Asia.

So for example, at any one point in the Asian market,

no one trader would actually know

exactly how much supply and how much demand

there is at any given time.

OK Lim would reach deep into his resources

and leverage on his relationships with his counterparts

to actually figure out what exactly was happening

in the market

and therefore to make bold decisions to dominate the market

and create a trading position that's beneficial for himself.

Once they purchased enough physical stockpiles

in the market

and created disruptions

in a certain time of period and a certain area,

it did squeeze the market and push the prices higher.

In that case, Hin Leong and OK Lim can always sell

the inventories and sell the products to end users

or other merchants for profit.

This strategy was one of the source of his success

for decades but not for this time.

In April of 2020, my colleague and I

had heard that banks were pulling financing and credit lines

away from Hin Leong.

And as we know, financing, credit lines and liquidity

are the lifeblood of trading.

So we knew that something big was brewing,

but we just didn't know what it was yet.

And it was only in the coming weeks

that more information and the answers were unveiled.

Covid-19 brought the global economy to a screeching halt

and one industry hit particularly hard was oil.

In the USA, the price of oil has collapsed to a record low

as demand dries up and storage runs out.

The price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate,

which is the benchmark for U.S. oil,

today traded as low as -$40 a barrel.

It's the first time the price has turned negative

in history.

According to the documents we've seen,

Hin Leong barely hedged the physical stockpiles

it's purchased.

So all of its physical stockpiles

are purely exposed to the market fluctuations.

Because the oil benchmark prices

slumped on coronavirus outbreaks in the world.

The value of physical stockpiles of Hin Leong reduced.

We know from our sources that OK Lim made opposition bets

on the oil prices because he believed

China will soon put the coronavirus in control

and the demand will recover very quickly.

So OK Lim was right in the first half of his prediction.

China did contain the outbreaks of coronavirus,

but what OK Lim didn't see is

the outbreak turn into a pandemic

and create larger demand destructions.

And banks start coming after him,

asking him to repay the unpaid debts.

Dozens of commercial and investment banks in Singapore

have a combined exposure of US$3.5 billion to Hin Leong,

of which HSBC had the biggest exposure of $600 million.

And other banks, such as DBS and ABN,

had more than $200 million exposure to Hin Leong.

So from speaking to our sources

and from documents that we obtained,

we came to realize that Hin Leong had actually not made

any profits for a couple of years

and that some of the oil that Hin Leong had used

for collaterals were actually already resold

to other customers.

It was shocking to see that the company had actually hid

$800 million in losses.

The growth model of Singapore,

the Southeast Asia and China has been changed

through these years.

And that could be part of the reason

why Hin Leong didn't make any profits.

Many countries start seeking replacement

of traditional fossil energy,

replacing them with renewable energy such as solar.

The coronavirus outbreak is just the trigger

of its collapse.

The founder of homegrown oil-trading firm

Hin Leong Trading has been charged with abetment of forgery

for the purpose of cheating.

Lim Oon Kuin allegedly asked an employee

to forge a document to state that Hin Leong had transferred

more than 1 million barrels of gas oil

to China Aviation Oil Corporation.

This document was allegedly used to secure

almost $77 million in trade funds

from a financial institution.

If found guilty, Lim could be jailed for up to 10 years

and fined.

Hin Leong and Lims is one of the most secretive

family businesses in Singapore.

Multiple attempts to Hin Leong and Lim's family for comments

went unsuccessful.

So after the Hin Leong episode,

when some banks found themselves with hundreds of millions

of dollars of losses,

we're seeing that the oil industry in Asia

is going through somewhat of an evolution

where smaller companies are finding it harder

to get credit lines and financing,

and even bigger companies, more reputable companies,

are also finding that credit lines are being shrunken.