The collapse of Hyflux in 2018 wiped out S$900 million held by 34,000 retail investors, turning one of Singapore's most admired corporate success stories into one of its largest corporate scandals. Founded in 1989 by Olivia Lum, Hyflux had grown from a small water-treatment outfit into a celebrated regional champion, and Lum herself was lionised as a self-made entrepreneur. The company's undoing was Tuaspring, an integrated water desalination and power plant project it won in 2011 with the lowest submitted bid: a first-year water tariff of just 45 cents per cubic metre to national water agency PUB, undercutting competitors by at least 27 percent.
The prosecution's case, laid out over a marathon criminal trial in 2025 and 2026, was that the bid was won on terms that made the plant unprofitable from the start, and that Lum intentionally failed to disclose material information to investors because she feared doing so would deter them. Key among the alleged omissions was the fact that Tuaspring's profitability hinged not on water sales but on electricity sales from its power plant component, at a time when power prices were weak and volatile. When electricity revenues collapsed, the losses from the power plant dragged the entire group down. Hyflux was placed under judicial management in November 2020 and wound up in 2021, leaving holders of its perpetual securities and preference shares, many of them ordinary retail investors who had regarded the instruments as safe, with nothing.
The trial became a landmark test of disclosure obligations for listed companies. Led by Deputy Chief Prosecutor Christopher Ong, the prosecution called 22 witnesses over 54 days of hearings spanning 59 weeks, including former Hyflux staff involved in preparing corporate announcements and bank representatives who had negotiated Tuaspring's financing. Lum's defence was led by Senior Counsel Davinder Singh. The proceedings put a harsh spotlight on the complexity of project finance, the temptations of aggressive bidding, and the gap between what companies tell the market and what their insiders know.
For the 34,000 investors, many of them retirees who had poured life savings into instruments marketed as stable income products, the case underscored the risks of reaching for yield without understanding the underlying business. Whatever the verdict, the Hyflux saga has already changed the conversation in Singapore about investor protection, the responsibilities of founders, and whether the regulatory framework does enough to warn small investors when a celebrated corporate star is quietly burning through cash.