Prosecutors closed their criminal case in September 2026 against Hyflux founder Olivia Lum, alleging she deliberately withheld material information about the Tuaspring project's dependence on electricity sales before the firm's collapse wiped out S$900 million of retail investors' money.
Lum was once one of Singapore's most celebrated entrepreneurs, having built Hyflux from scratch into a global water-treatment name. The turning point came in 2011, when Hyflux won the tender for Tuaspring, Singapore's largest desalination plant, with the lowest submitted bid: a first-year water tariff of 45 cents per cubic metre, undercutting rivals by at least 27 per cent. Prosecutors allege the price meant the plant would operate at a loss on water sales alone, and that the project's profitability secretly hinged on selling electricity from its co-located power plant into Singapore's volatile power market.
According to the prosecution, led by Deputy Chief Prosecutor Christopher Ong, a consortium of banks raised serious concerns in 2011 after learning of the electricity-sales plan, and only three banks later offered limited financing, which Hyflux declined. With bank funding out of reach, the company raised S$400 million in April 2011 through an oversubscribed preference share issue. Prosecutors allege the offer documents omitted key risks about Tuaspring's power-market exposure, information the 65-year-old Lum intentionally withheld because she feared it would deter investors. She had been determined to win the bid to cement Hyflux's status as a global desalination leader as its Middle Eastern ventures faltered.
The bet failed. Weak electricity prices crushed the project's economics. Hyflux sought court protection in May 2018, freezing repayments on S$900 million in perpetual and preference securities held by about 34,000 retail investors, many of whom had treated the instruments as safe savings. A S$400 million rescue by Indonesia-linked SM Investments collapsed in April 2019, and the firm was placed under judicial management in November 2020 before being wound up in 2021. National water agency PUB took over Tuaspring for zero dollars, and the power station was eventually sold to YTL PowerSeraya in June 2022 for S$270 million, with proceeds going largely to secured creditors and little to nothing left for retail investors.
The criminal trial, which closed on September 29 after 59 weeks of proceedings and 22 witnesses, saw Lum defended by Senior Counsel Davinder Singh. The defence was to indicate in October whether to submit that there was no case to answer. Whatever the verdict, the Hyflux saga has become Singapore's defining lesson on disclosure failures, the risks of complex project finance, and the human cost when retail investors bear risks they never understood.