Singapore shipping tycoon Teo Siong Seng was indicted by the US Justice Department over an alleged global conspiracy to raise dry-container prices through restricted production, placing one of the city-state's most prominent business figures at the centre of a sweeping antitrust probe. The indictment, filed in January and unsealed in May 2026, charged four of the world's largest container manufacturers and seven of their executives with violating Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act in a conspiracy the department said affected billions of dollars of commerce.
The corporate defendants were China International Marine Containers, Singamas Container Holdings, Shanghai Universal Logistics Equipment, operating as Dong Fang International Containers, and CXIC Group Containers, which together with two unnamed co-conspirators control about 95 percent of global production of standard unrefrigerated dry containers. The seven individual defendants included the chief executives of all four companies: Siong Seng Teo, 71, chairman and CEO of Singamas; Boliang Mai of CIMC; and senior executives Tianhua Huang, Yongbo Wan, Qianmin Li, Yuqiang Zhang and Vick Nam Hing Ma, the Singamas marketing director.
According to the indictment, the conspiracy ran from at least November 2019 to January 2024. It began in earnest at a meeting at CIMC's Shenzhen headquarters in November 2019, where executives agreed to restrict production by limiting factory operating hours and shifts, avoiding new plants, and monitoring production lines with surveillance cameras, 87 cameras across 49 lines. The group later coordinated quotas for specific customers and, from 2022, agreed to cap total output volumes, with a financial penalty mechanism punishing members that exceeded their quotas. The Justice Department said the multi-year conspiracy roughly doubled container prices between 2019 and 2021, increasing manufacturers' profits approximately one hundredfold during the COVID-19 pandemic and the global supply chain crisis. Singamas itself swung from a US$110 million loss to a profit of about US$186.8 million over the same period.
Court documents painted a picture of conspirators conscious of their exposure: after a December 2019 meeting, a Singamas executive reported to Teo that he had reminded the others not to be high profile since it might violate the monopoly law or invite accusations of price manipulation by customers. In April 2026, Vick Nam Hing Ma was arrested in France and now awaits extradition to the United States; the other six individual defendants remain at large.
Teo, who also controls Pacific International Lines, the world's twelfth-largest container line, headed the Singapore Shipping Association for many years and served as a member of parliament until 2014. He had become chairman of the Singapore Business Federation in May 2025. After the indictment was unsealed, Singapore's Ministry of Trade and Industry said Teo would stand down from his roles at the federation, the Singapore Economic Resilience Taskforce and Enterprise Singapore to address the allegations. The case has intensified scrutiny of Singapore's maritime industry, following the jailing of the Hin Leong Trading founder and a US$241 million corruption settlement by Seatrium in Brazil, raising uncomfortable questions about governance in one of the sectors closest to the nation's economic identity.