Mr Lau, who spent 17 years at an American multinational company and earned about $10,000 a month, was retrenched in March as part of a restructuring exercise.

"I was confident at first, because I used to get calls from headhunters," he says.

"But when I was out of work, the market went silent."

He is among a growing pool of white-collar job seekers who are finding it increasingly difficult to get hired again.

Figures from the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) show that the re-entry rate in the first half of the year plunged to a seven-year low.

Professionals, managers, executives and technicians (PMETs) bore the brunt, with their re-entry rates falling from 43 per cent in March to 40 per cent in June.

PMETs and those aged 40 or older made up the majority of those laid off in the past quarter.

Even so, Mr Lau is undeterred. The important thing for out-of-work PMETs like himself to remember in the face of setbacks, he says, is that none of it is personal. "These are all business decisions. It's not you. You need to keep fighting."

The going can be tough. Mr Patrick Tay, assistant secretary-general of the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC), says many employers might avoid hiring mature PMETs, fearing that they will be over-qualified or expect higher salaries, or that they cannot swallow having to report to others.

Mr Lau has applied to 50 organisations through headhunters since he lost his job. He has landed eight interviews, but none was successful.

Local firms thought he had spent too much time in multinational corporations. Japanese companies thought he was too immersed in American culture.

Some interviewers wanted to know if he could work under supervisors younger than him. Others questioned his energy level.

"It's not that there aren't jobs out there," he says. "I could see them, lots of them. It's just that something was always wrong.

"And when it keeps happening, you start to ask yourself - is it me? Am I not competent?

"That feeling becomes a burden. It becomes devastating."

It is a difficult period for his family. His wife, 45, had left her position as an IT manager in January, while her father, a construction supervisor in his 60s, had also lost his job.

She had been looking for another job in IT but, in the end, she took a 40 per cent cut in pay and joined the education industry in June.

Mr Lau is worried about his two sons, aged 14 and 16, and whether their tuition and extra-curricular activities will be affected if the family's savings dry up. He also supports his elderly mother, aged 81.

On the plus side, when he is not tied up with job searching, he earns extra income through freelancing, which includes conducting mathematics enrichment classes for primary school pupils.

He has also gone for training courses in areas such as project management, although they have not given him a discernible edge over the competition.

"When I was taking those courses, there were thousands of people doing the same thing," he says.

For his next step, he intends to explore career programmes through NTUC's U PME Centre - a one-stop facility at Raffles Place that helps PMEs get career and legal advice. He also hopes to join a professional conversion programme; such schemes help mid-career professionals switch to other industries.

Rickmers, a trust, has already said it will not be able to pay $4.2 million worth of coupons due November, unless note holders agreed to lose more of their principal.

It got off on the wrong foot with note holders at a meeting two weeks ago, when Mr Soeren Andersen, chief executive of Rickmers Trust Management, urged note holders to swap their $100 million principal for $28 million perpetual bonds, convertible into 20 per cent of units in the trust.

Note holders balked at the 60 per cent haircut even as Rickmers units continued to slide to an all-time low of 3.8 cents on Monday. Rickmers said the swap would allow it to access a $260.2 million bank facility.

A week later, Rickmers revised its offer, proposing a swap of the $100 million principal for $40 million due November 2023, and exchanging the rest for 60 per cent of the trust, after issuing 1.32 billion new units. The $100 million 8.45 per cent notes had been due next May.

Many note holders remained unpersuaded, as there would still be no cash on the table for them.

Retiree Jeremy Tan, 77, who bought $2.25 million of notes, said: "Many issuers such as AusGroup and Marco Polo Marine are restructuring but Rickmers has proposed the worst deal."

More than 50 note holders who together hold $26 million of Rickmers notes have signed an acceleration notice, delivered to trustee DB International Trust yesterday.

The trustee must verify the identities of the note holders and check that their combined holdings cross the 25 per cent threshold before passing the notice on to Rickmers.

The notices could prompt creditor banks to file claims over the trust to protect their own interests.

Many note holders The Straits Times spoke to said they are prepared for the worst. A businessman, who preferred to be known as Mr Kok, said: "I hope not to lose my principal, but we must show a position."

Steel businessman Ong C. T. said he was prepared to forego $250,000. "I'm holding bonds of six or seven other oil and gas issuers. I want them to think twice before they try to bulldoze note holders."

Once fragmented, the note holders started to coalesce after a meeting called by Rickmers two weeks ago. They then scrambled to find one another via social media.

They have provisionally engaged consultant Deloitte, whom they hope can find common ground with Rickmers' adviser, PwC, to figure out a workable plan.

Mr Kok added: "We need to have an independent adviser for us to have a clear understanding of the financial situation of the company."

Rickmers Trust Management said in a statement yesterday evening that it had not received any notice from the notes trustee that the notes are immediately due and payable.

"It's time for Singapore's regulators to rethink how they define the accredited-investor regime," said Christopher Chen, an assistant law professor at Singapore Management University. "Here, if someone happens to own a landed property, likely that person will become an accredited investor. If investors are really rich, it's not a problem. But some people are semi-rich, or look rich on paper."

A Singapore-based spokesman for HSBC declined to comment on Tham's case, referring inquiries about the sales practices of the bank's relationship managers to its 2013 annual report. In that report, HSBC said it stopped linking wealth-management relationship managers' incentives to sales volumes for the U.K. and France that year, and would make that effective in most markets by 2014.

Singapore law allows banks to automatically classify individual investors as "accredited" if they have at least S$2 million of assets or earned at least S$300,000 in the previous 12 months. By entering the category, the wealthy are given a greater range of investment choices but lose some of the key protections offered to ordinary investors — such as restrictions on selling them certain riskier products. Swiber bonds were only available to accredited investors or those investing a minimum of S$250,000, according to Robson Lee, a Singapore-based partner at the U.S. law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP.

Property Riches

As property prices surged over the past decade, many middle-class Singaporeans entered the accredited investor category due to the high value of their homes. A mass-market 1,000 square-foot suburban apartment was worth S$1.26 million on average in the second quarter, Savills Plc data show, while a same-sized luxury apartment in the center of town would be worth S$2.34 million. About 20 percent of Singaporean households live in private housing, government data show.

"They are wealthy by technical definition, but in reality they may not have enough disposable assets to withstand such losses," said Lee at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. "There are many Swiber bond investors who are left high and dry as they were persuaded by their bankers to buy such high-yield products with money they can ill afford to lose."

More than 80 percent of some Swiber bond issues were sold to clients of Singapore private banks, which cater for the wealthiest investors. Swiber is currently under interim judicial management and missed a payment on a bond coupon in August, which triggered cross defaults on all its issues.

Asked about the implications of the Swiber default for investor protection, the Monetary Authority of Singapore said it's proposing revisions to the law which will prevent banks from assigning accredited investor status to those whose wealth is mostly in property. The changes will also require that individuals be allowed to decide if they wish to "opt in" to accredited status and thereby forgo the protections afforded to ordinary investors. The MAS plans to introduce the revisions to Parliament by the fourth quarter, it said Sept. 2 in an e-mailed response to questions from Bloomberg News.

Allowing wealthy investors to opt in to the accredited investor regime will bring Singapore up to the investor protection standards of Hong Kong and the European Union, the MAS said in its proposed amendments to the law.

Regardless of investors' status, "private banks are expected to adopt fair business practices and act in the best interests of their clients," the MAS said.

Hong Kong introduced safeguards earlier this year for wealthier people in the "individual professional investor" category, requiring banks to ensure that products they sell are appropriate for a client's risk profile and financial situation.

Lehman Losses

Regulators in both Singapore and Hong Kong have sought to boost investor protection after mis-selling scandals at the time of the 2008 global financial crisis caused investors millions of dollars of losses. The most notorious was the sale of structured products linked to Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. — investments that soured rapidly following the U.S. bank's collapse in September 2008. Sixteen Hong Kong banks were forced to repay about $800 million to investors, while 10 financial services institutions in Singapore were banned temporarily from selling structured products.

Regulators had been "too relaxed" about the selling process back in 2008, said David Webb, a Hong Kong-based shareholder activist and deputy chairman of the city's takeovers panel. "Just because someone is wealthy it doesn't mean that they are also sophisticated as investors. Regulators need to adopt an approach which can handle both ends of the spectrum of sophistication."

The growing signs of stress in Singapore's domestic bond market suggest wealthy investors may face further losses. Last week, Rickmers Maritime and Marco Polo Marine Ltd. said they are having difficulty with bond repayments, as their operations have been hurt by weaker oil prices.

The wealthy are especially vulnerable because of their large exposure to the local bond market. Private-bank clients bought about 44 percent of Singapore-dollar bonds issued in 2014, the most of any investor group, MAS figures show. By comparison, private banks and retail investors accounted for just 11 percent of purchases of U.S. dollar-denominated Asian credit in the same year, according to a Deutsche Asset Management presentation.

The revisions to the law proposed by the MAS might have helped another Singaporean bondholder, Sandeep Kapoor, who says he is facing losses after buying S$250,000 of Swiber bonds in 2014. The 50-year-old engineer said he only found out he was an accredited investor last month, some two years after the purchase, via his relationship manager at DBS Group Holdings Ltd.

Under the proposed revisions, he would have been given the chance to opt in to accredited investor status, rather than being automatically assigned to the category because of his wealth.

In an e-mailed reply to questions, DBS said: "Our relationship managers are focused on investor suitability and go through a robust process to ensure that our clients fully understand the product before making their investments." The bank's accredited investor clients "are kept informed of their AI status at various stages, including at the time of account opening, account review, and after every trade conducted," DBS added.

Kapoor said he would choose not to be an accredited investor, given the chance. "Who would understand the full consequence of being an accredited investor? It can be a grey area."

...

Swiber has four local-currency debentures and one yuan-denominated note outstanding, according to Bloomberg data. The group had US$1.43 billion (S$1.93 billion) of liabilities and US$1.99 billion in total assets on March 31, according to its latest quarterly accounts.

DBS Group and United Overseas Bank are among its 10 principal bankers, according to its 2015 annual report.

DBS had said it expects to recover about half of its total exposure of S$700 million to Swiber, and would provide fully for the anticipated shortfall.

As for UOB, chief executive Wee Ee Cheong had said the bank has "some exposure" to the oil and gas contractor, but it was "manageable".

In a statement after the filing, DBS said it has exposure to Swiber through loans, bonds and off-balance sheet items.

DBS said it planned to tap into reserves to offset the half of its exposure that it doesn't expect to recover, and anticipates booking a shortfall charge of about S$150 million.

Analysts said DBS' exposure has raised risks about sharper-than-expected asset quality deterioration for banks.

Goldman Sachs said in a note the additional S$150 million of provisions to be taken in the second quarter ending June will impact its 2016 earnings by a negative 3 percent due to higher credit cost. The investment bank cut its price target on DBS to S$17.60 from S$17.70.

Shares in DBS, which will report results for the quarter ended June on Aug. 8, fell for a second straight day on Friday and at 10.38am were down 2.5 per cent at S$15.47.

UNDER PRESSURE

Speaking during a briefing after reporting quarterly earnings, OCBC Chief Executive Office Samuel Tsien warned the oil and gas services sector continues to be under pressure.

"The loan demand is very weak," he said, after OCBC posted a 15 percent drop in quarterly profit, hit by lower insurance income. "Our distressed indicators for this portfolio continue to deepen, but have not broadened."

Over the next year-and-a-half, bonds totalling nearly S$1.2 billion from energy and offshore marine issuers in Singapore will mature, with S$615 million due just over the next five months, according to IFR, a Thomson Reuters publication.

OCBC's total oil and gas exposure was S$12.6 billion, nearly half of which to the offshore oil services segment.

Meanwhile UOB expects that over the next one to two years the key concern for the bank will be companies in the oil and gas sector, its CEO Wee Ee Cheong told a briefing. UOB surprised analysts with a 5.1 per cent jump in earnings on higher trading income.

While their earnings trends differed, net interest income was weak at both banks, which also saw bad-debt provisions climb.

OCBC said its customer loans contracted 2 per cent from a year ago due to lower trade loans and reduced offshore borrowings of Chinese companies due to more favourable onshore borrowing rates in China.

Shares of UOB were down 1.6 per cent in Friday morning trade, while OCBC fell 1.7 percent.

Uber said she is the only Caucasian woman out of its "tens of thousands of driver partners", over 98 per cent of whom are Singaporean.

The single mother of two leaves quite an impression on passengers, not only because of her outgoing personality, but also because of her story.

She moved to Singapore with her banker husband in 2010 and became a permanent resident in 2013. But their 13-year marriage ended last year after he had an affair. He has since remarried.

Ms Gibbons said that under the Hague Convention — which is meant to offer protection from cross-border child abductions — she cannot leave the country with her children without her former husband's consent.

"I can't move on with my life until he decides we can leave," she told The Sunday Times.

She estimates there could be 200 expatriate women divorcees in Singapore, going by the number in a support group.

Although her husband pays maintenance which covers the rent for her family's apartment in Pasir Ris, fees for the children's local school and other living expenses, she wanted to make her children's lives easier by having a car. She started driving with Uber in April.

Uber-owned Lion City Rental gives her a 10 per cent discount on the car rental because she is a single mum. She works an average of 30 hours a week, when the kids are in school or asleep.

It has been hard for her 10-year- old son and eight-year-old daughter to adjust to life after the divorce. "My daughter is the only white child in her year, and the only white child whose parents don't live together," she said. "When you're going through a divorce with children, they need that stability... In Singapore your friends become your family, but friends aren't the same as a granddad or an aunt and uncle."

But the job has been like "a lifeline" for her, and she enjoys talking to her customers. She once found herself counselling a woman whose husband also had an affair. "She said it's nice to talk to someone who has been through it and come out the other side," she said.

Passengers have left feedback for her in the Uber app commending her for being "very strong" or thanking her for sharing her story.

Business developer Rachel Ooi, 28, who took a half-hour ride in Ms Gibbons' car last Friday, said: "A lot of Singaporeans often see Caucasian women as tai-tais (wealthy housewives)... But if they go through a divorce and they have kids it can become very messy."

He also revealed details of the bicycle-sharing scheme that will be launched in the Jurong Lake District next year.

The scheme will have about 1,000 bicycles spread across 100 docking stations, which will be within walking distance from each other. The bicycles will be available for use 24 hours a day.

A tender for an operator for the system will be called next week, said Mr Khaw.

Explaining why Singapore needed to go car-lite, Mr Khaw said city planners have come to the conclusion that the traditional car-centric city model was not sustainable.

"Cars require car parks and require roads, and both require large tracts of land. They are inefficiently used. Unlike public transport, private cars are typically used only for a very short period each day, and are left in the parking lots the rest of the time," he said.

About 12 per cent of Singapore's land is used for roads. In comparison, 14 per cent of land is used for housing.

In addition, cars spend only about 4 per cent of the time in motion, according to a recent study by government think-tank the Centre for Liveable Cities, and the Urban Land Institute, a US-based research organisation.

Mr Khaw also pointed out that car-lite cities tend to be more liveable than car-centric ones, where streets are designed for cars.

"In terms of urban design, pedestrians are effectively afterthoughts, compared to the car," said Mr Khaw.

For Madam Wendy Ng, 52, the increasingly frequent comings-and-goings at the four-storey terraced house next to hers have annoyed her so much, she even hired a private investigator.

Madam Ng, the managing director of an air-conditioning company, lives in a similar terraced house at Penaga Place in Sembawang. She has cancelled or postponed all of her firm's jobs over the last two months to deal with a problem that she said began about two years ago. The regular stream of guests and taxis stopping near her home gave rise to concerns over security.

"Every time, (there are) different faces, that means their faces are not local ... so we feel insecure," she told TODAY, adding that some guests returned or left the house in the middle of the night.

Last August, she raised the matter with the Member of Parliament of her constituency, Mr Khaw Boon Wan, who is also Transport Minister.

Following her complaint, officers from Certis Cisco — the URA's appointed agent — tried to inspect her neighbour's premises but the house was locked, so Madam Ng decided to take a different course of action.

She engaged the services of a private investigator in May to gather videographic and photographic evidence of what went on over a week in the property, among other things. The investigator's report, handed to Madam Ng earlier this month, was submitted to the URA on Friday (July 8).

She said this assignment set her back by "a few thousand" dollars, but she was willing to part with this "expensive" sum.

Madam Ng also filed a petition imploring the authorities to take "immediate action against the errant owner".

As of Friday, it has been signed by 37 residents in Penaga Place and areas nearby.

There were some Penaga Place residents who said that they were not affected. Mr Raymond Lee, 58, who lives across from Madam Ng, said that there was no disturbance and the area was very quiet. "It's part and parcel of living in a community. The complaint has no standing," the business consultant said.

Housewife Fadilah Ishak, 31, urged mutual respect and said that her family's safety and security were not compromised.

Madam Ng said that the property's owner no longer lived in the house and a Filipino domestic helper attended to the guests.

On the Airbnb site, the owner, listed as Dione Schick, wrote that she and her husband, William, who were from New Zealand, have lived here for 11 years. They are "offsite" during the week and only at the property "sometimes during the weekends to tend to the garden".

Mrs Schick has three listings on the site, with a master bedroom on the second floor of her house going at S$70 a night for a minimum 14-night stay. Asked about the concerns raised by Madam Ng, Mrs Schick, who is a Singapore citizen, would only say that they were looking for long-term tenants.

She pointed out that the way buyers and sellers connect around the world was changing radically and navigating that "takes time". "I'm practising, I'm learning, I'm trying to figure out, I want to stay within the rules," Mrs Schick said, adding that she felt Madam Ng had not been civil.

When contacted, an Airbnb spokesperson did not answer questions about the home or its listings in Singapore. "If issues do arise, we work with our community to try and resolve them," the spokesperson said.

Complaints by disgruntled homeowners such as Madam Ng have been growing steadily over the past three years. The URA told TODAY that it has received 259 complaints about short-term stays in the first half of this year alone. In 2013, 2014 and last year, it received 231, 375 and 377 such complaints respectively.

A public consultation exercise done last year to seek feedback on whether short-term stays should be allowed in private homes did not bring about a "clear consensus", the URA said.

The public acknowledged the need to accommodate demand for short-term home-sharing, but they also strongly endorsed existing URA rules meant to "preserve the privacy and sanctity valued by the vast majority of homeowners".

Saying it needed more time to study the issue, the authority reiterated that the six-month rule for stays in private homes "must be observed"

While income returns have been meagre in recent years, residential properties remain a popular investment class, with investors setting aside the bulk of their savings in the hope that they can one day buy a house once prices eventually drop.

The report noted that Singapore households are sitting on a "cash pile of $374 billion, which has surged since property curbs were rolled out in 2009."

"We believe that residential properties are sucking in surplus capital, with an increasing number of Singaporeans buying their second and third properties. This is economically non-productive."

Maybank believes the economy will be better off if Singaporeans use this idle capital elsewhere, such as improving consumer spending and boosting entrepreneurship.

Singaporeans have to be weaned from their long-held aspirations of becoming landlords earning passive rental income, while investors should let go of their belief that investment properties are the best asset class to own, it said.

"To ensure Singapore's long-term survival, we believe the government should not remove (the) property cooling measures. A sustained and gradual easing of property prices is necessary to restore business competitiveness, in our view. If part of the monies that has been locked away in anticipation of a bottoming of the property cycle flows towards productive assets or even consumption, we believe entrepreneurship can be enhanced and thrive," added Maybank Kim Eng.

The electric cars will be powered by 2,000 charging points at selected parking spaces in 500 locations, of which 80 per cent would be within neighbourhoods.

Key industrial estates, commercial areas and the Central Business District will also be served by charging points under the scheme, which is jointly led by the Land Transport Authority (LTA) and the Economic Development Board (EDB).

At a signing ceremony yesterday, Coordinating Minister for Infrastructure and Minister for Transport Khaw Boon Wan announced that the first fleet of 125 BlueSG cars will hit the road from the middle of next year. As part of the 10-year contract, the public can use up to 20 per cent of the 2,000 charging points.

Ang Mo Kio, Jurong East and Punggol will be among the first Housing Board towns to have a total of 50 EV stations and 250 charging points installed.

The move will lay the groundwork for a wider adoption of EVs in Singapore, which will contribute to the country's vision of a car-lite and green-car society, Mr Khaw said.

"Car-sharing allows more people to have access to a car without needing to own one," he said. "It is useful for the occasional trip where taking public transport may not be as convenient."

Eventually, the EV infrastructure may be expanded to support public transport such as taxis and buses.

It is understood that the scheme will be co-funded by the Government, although the parties have declined to reveal the cost.

Unlike existing car-sharing operators such as Car Club, BlueSG will operate a one-way model - which allows users to return the electric car at their destination.

Users can book a BlueSG car online or via a mobile app at least 20 minutes in advance, and they will be charged for the rent by duration rather than the distance travelled.

There will also be an option for a daily and annual membership.

The cars can be dropped off at any BlueSG station near the user's destination. Parking spaces can be reserved in advance.

Electric cars do not have tailpipes that emit pollution unlike conventional cars fuelled by petrol, and a BlueSG car will be able to travel for some 250km before it needs to be charged.

Bollore Group currently operates Autolib, the world's largest electric car-sharing programme in Paris. Since it started operating in December 2011, 31,000 conventional cars have been removed from the roads. It currently has a fleet of 4,000 electric cars and 130,000 regular users.

The group was selected from 13 participants in a request for information exercise in December 2014, Mr Khaw said.

National University of Singapore transport researcher Lee Der Horng believes that Singapore is a suitable location for EVs due to its small geographical size and dense urban environment.

"To promote EVs here, sharing is the way to go as many Singaporeans still have a few practical considerations when deciding to buy an electric car," he said.

NUS undergraduate Kuek Jia Jun, 24, who is eager to try out the scheme, said: "I hope to be more environmentally conscious, so this will allow me to use an electric car without needing to own and maintain one, which can be expensive."