SINGAPORE (July 15): The Singapore Exchange (SGX) will waive buy-in penalties for short sellers following Thursday’s outage of its securities platform, CEO of SGX Loh Boon Chye said during a conference call on Friday.

He added that the disruption, which caused trading to cease at 11.38am on Thursday, was triggered by hardware issues found in its systems provided by Nasdaq.

In response to a question from The Edge Markets whether the reasons behind the delay in resuming trade were similar to the glitches faced in 2014, Loh only said that the factors behind yesterday’s disruption are separate from those two years ago.

In 2014, SGX had to halt trading twice due to a power outage and a fault in its software.

Loh declined to divulge more details about the specific causes behind yesterday’s outage when pressed by various reporters, only saying that during disruptions, they are “focused on recovery and minimising downtime to resume trading… [and] more importantly to provide a robust platform.”

He added that they are now working closely with the Monetary Authority of Singapore to monitor the situation.  

Loh also declined to comment on the specific parties that will be held responsible for the issue, only that “we are holding the company, [SGX], accountable.”

Trading on SGX’s securities market was suspended yesterday after trade confirmation messages were either duplicated or went missing.

The operator had planned to reopen markets at around 2.00pm and 4.00pm on Thursday, but failed to meet those deadlines and closed for the rest of the day instead.

During the call, Loh apologised again for the mishap, and said, “we are not pleased with our own recovery time and it has to be better, and we’ll do better. [What we have learnt] from this is to ensure we minimise [the market’s] downtime… and I want to reassure all that we will address the issues.”

Ramesh Rajentheran, chief financial officer of Fullerton Health which is seeking a listing on the Mainboard, said, “We don’t think [the trading halt will have] a huge impact on liquidity. SGX is very well regulated so there are a lot of international investors that [will still invest here]. SGX is not the first exchange to be hit by issues like the trading halt. Even when I was working on the trading floor in London, occasionally a lot of the European bourses also had the same issues. To us I don’t think it alters any fundamental reason for companies looking at listing on the SGX."

The regional managed healthcare provider plans to raise some $300 million, potentially one of the biggest IPOs in more than a year.