Allen & Gledhill advised Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation Limited (“OCBC”), acting through its Sydney Branch, on the issue of A$1 billion floating rate green notes due 2028 (“Notes”) under its US$30 billion global medium term note programme.
The net proceeds of the Notes will be allocated towards the financing or refinancing of new or existing qualifying assets which meet the eligibility criteria for green bonds under OCBC’s sustainability bond framework.
Advising OCBC was Allen & Gledhill Partner Glenn David Foo.
BEIJING, Aug. 18 (Xinhua) — The central parity rate of the Chinese currency renminbi, or the yuan, strengthened 49 pips to 7.1322 against the U.S. dollar Monday, according to the China Foreign Exchange Trade System.
In China’s spot foreign exchange market, the yuan is allowed to rise or fall by 2 percent from the central parity rate each trading day.
The central parity rate of the yuan against the U.S. dollar is based on a weighted average of prices offered by market makers before the opening of the interbank market each business day. ■
One of the hallmarks of the legal profession is that it has historically been very labour-intensive, with a great deal of time spent on manual tasks like document review, legal research and drafting.
Legal professionals must conduct comprehensive research when building their case.
Sifting through vast volumes of data and documents to find a single relevant clause or case can be an incredibly slow and tedious process.
We a looking at how we can build similar AI tools for other sectors, says IMDA’s Janet Chiew.
The process requires them to spend countless hours reading through lengthy judgments, each containing tens of thousands of words. And there are no shortcuts.
Fortunately, technology can help.
Artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models (LLMs), can be used to automate many of the repetitive text-heavy tasks that have traditionally consumed time in the legal profession.
It is with this premise that the Infocomm Media Development Authority of Singapore (IMDA) partnered with the Singapore Academy of Law (SAL) to create GPT-Legal, an LLM which makes legal research quicker and more efficient.
The LLM for the legal fraternity debuted at TechLaw.Fest 2024.
IMDA’s Deputy Director (Incubation), Janet Chiew, notes that around two out of every three judgments in Singapore are not summarised, and some of these judgments can span up to 100 pages.
The team behind GPT-Legal trained the model to provide legal summaries that use official legal terminology and follow the standard format in use by the Singapore legal fraternity, which consists of catchwords, facts, and holdings.
IMDA looks to tap the potential of generative AI (GenAI) to benefit Singapore’s text-heavy legal profession.
Speaking to GovInsider, Chiew says that the main objective is to make the legal sector “more efficient”.
Distinct blend of influences
She notes that Singapore’s legal system stands out for its distinctive blend of influences from multiple jurisdictions.
While it is fundamentally rooted in English common law, Singapore’s legal system incorporates elements from other jurisdictions, including the US and India.
“This unique legal landscape presents both opportunities and challenges for legal practitioners and technology developers. For AI models like GPT Legal to be effective, they must be intimately familiar with the specific terminologies, legal principles, and formatting conventions that arise from this complex mix of legal sources,” she adds.
To date, GPT-Legal has been used to generate summaries of over 15,000 court judgments, condensing 8,000-word judgments into concise 800-word summaries.
“These summaries follow the format and structure of ‘headnotes’, which are the official summaries of select judgments authored by Justices’ Law Clerks. The summaries can be found on SAL LawNet,” Chiew adds.
Overcoming hurdles
Chiew notes that a core part of GPT Legal’s vision is to foster trust and confidence among its users.
Talking about the hurdles the team overcame, she notes that data quality and model accuracy go hand-in-hand.
“If the system is trained but uses poor-quality data, users would get poor responses from the system. Gen AI systems are prone to hallucinations, so it is paramount that we figure out ways to mitigate this and assist users in detecting these as well,” she notes.
The challenge of GenAI hallucination was particularly critical in the legal domain, where accuracy is paramount. And the users in SAL need to identify hallucinations before the summaries are rolled out, Chiew adds.
One of the challenges centres around finding high-quality legal data due to the rarity of vetted, comprehensive legal documents.
The model also needs to contend with the risk of “catastrophic forgetting” during fine-tuning, where specialised training might cause the AI to lose previously learned knowledge.
Chiew says the team developed a comprehensive suite of safety features that work with the users.
“Our system shows users exactly where each summary paragraph originates through similarity highlighting. It also flags weakly substantiated paragraphs and potentially hallucinated entities,” she adds.
Most importantly, every summary must achieve a 90 per cent score when “we conduct automated and randomised fact-checking” before being presented to users.
To achieve this level of accuracy, the team invested heavily in Direct Preference Optimisation (DPO) – a technique to align AI with the legal professionals’ needs, Chiew shares.
“Legal professionals helped to ‘mark’ our system responses, and these markings are then used to align the model. This iterative process is crucial for aligning our AI with legal terminology and Singapore’s unique legal context. The support from SAL and the legal community has been amazing,” she adds.
Positive feedback
Chiew notes that there has been good feedback on the usefulness of the model. “We are glad that the summarisation model has managed to improve the productivity for this process,” she adds.
She notes that the team is working to expand the capabilities to include features that would be useful for the legal fraternity, and “they will be publicly shared when ready”.
During an earlier presentation on GPT-Legal at GovInsider’s Festival of Innovation 2025, Chiew mentioned that the focus would be on collaborating with industry partners, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), and legal tech firms to develop transformative tools that can uplift job scopes and roles across different legal practice areas.
This includes potential applications in front-office technology, back-end services, and comprehensive support for lawyers in various legal domains.
The development roadmap prioritises continuous improvement of the model’s accuracy, context understanding, and safeguards, says Chiew.
IMDA plans to refine the model’s ability to handle large, complex legal documents while maintaining high standards of semantic accuracy and reducing hallucinations.
Summing up, Chiew says: “Now that we have gained experience creating AI solutions for the legal sector, we are excited to see how we can work with other sectors to build similar specialised AI tools to unlock greater possibilities.”
An Australian court has fined airline giant Qantas A$90m (£43m; $59m) for illegally sacking some 1,700 ground workers during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Australia’s Transport Workers’ Union said it welcomed the ruling, which it said marked the largest employer penalty in the country’s history.
Federal Court Justice Michael Lee said in the judgement that he wanted the fine to act as a “real deterrence” to other employers.
The BBC has contacted Qantas for comment.
Australia’s biggest airline has faced a years-long legal battle over its decision in 2020 to outsource its ground operations staff, which it said was a necessary financial measure as the aviation industry came to a standstill during the pandemic.
Qantas was ordered by the court to pay A$50m of the penalty directly to the transport workers’ union, which had sued the airline over the layoffs.
The decision marked the “end of a David and Goliath five-year battle” and is a “moment of justice for loyal workers who’d loved their jobs at the airline,” said the transport union in a statement.
The penalty is on top of A$120m of compensation that Qantas had agreed to pay to laid off workers in 2024, after losing multiple appeals in court.
Victoria-based uninterrupted power supply (UPS) distributor Orion Energy has scored two wins at Vertiv’s recent 2025 Asia Channel Summit in Da Nag, Vietnam.
The awards were handed out at its annual partner recognition ceremony, which recognises organisations for “exceptional contributions in sales, innovation, vertical market success, and solutions,” according to the vendor.
During the ceremony, Orion took home the Highest Sales Achievement Award for Distribution in the Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) region and the 2024 Product Trailblazer Award for Single Phase UPS.
The distributor was one of two Australian businesses to win an award, with the other being Metrowest Services, the service arm for power generation, electrical contracting, communications, and preventative and reactive maintenance sector solution provider Metrowest Group, which won the 2024 Vertical Achievement Award for Mining.
“The Australia and New Zealand region continues to show strong growth, driven by our partners’ deep expertise and ability to adapt to changing market demands,” said Vertiv A/NZ senior sales director LuLu Shiraz.
“Their commitment to delivering reliable, future-ready infrastructure solutions is critical to our success in the region. We sincerely thank our partners for their continued trust, collaboration, and contribution to our shared growth.”
Soho House Members’ Club Nearing a Deal to Go Private
The company helped spark a wave of private clubs in New York and boasts more than 200,000 members worldwide.
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Air Canada Flight Attendants to Defy Back-to-Work Order
The airline is facing a crisis after its flight attendants walked off the job over the weekend and rejected a government order to return to work.
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Your Wait for a Tesla Robo-Taxi Ride Is Almost Over, Musk Says
Tesla’s robo-taxi offering in Austin, Texas, should expand in September.
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Welcome to the Fast-Food Industry’s Crispy Chicken Summer
The crispy chicken sandwich wars are heating up, with fast-food heavyweights quickly expanding their offerings while upstart chains plot to capture more territory.
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Disney’s Marvel Abandons Georgia, Taking Livelihoods With It
Tax incentives lured studios to help build the ‘Hollywood of the South,’ but now Marvel and others are going overseas for cheaper labor costs.
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Getting to the Moon or Mars? Musk and Bezos Tackle Space Travel’s Refueling Problem
Spacecraft that could fuel up in orbit would be less weighed down at liftoff and fly deeper into space; making those refills happen is a big challenge for SpaceX and Blue Origin.
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Walmart and rivals report earnings, for the clearest look yet at tariffs’ impact on consumers. Will CEOs talk about the elephant in the room?
The nation’s biggest retailer reports results on Thursday as signs emerge that U.S. tariffs could be nudging prices higher.
A2 Milk raised hopes of an expansion in profit margins as it doubled down on Chinese demand for infant formula by buying a manufacturing plant in New Zealand’s North Island.
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NAB Flags Higher Costs as Credit Impairments Hit Profit
National Australia Bank flagged higher annual operating costs due to continued payroll problems, while a steep rise in credit impairment charges sparked a 13% fall in third-quarter profit.
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Shein and Temu Face Tougher Times in the U.S. That’s Good News for Amazon.
Both companies saw a drop in U.S. web traffic and sales after a change in tax and trade policy in the spring. Amazon, Gap, and others are benefiting.
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Big Tech Is Eating Itself in Talent War
The scramble by tech companies for top AI talent is using unorthodox methods that imperil Silicon Valley’s startup culture.
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Six Flags Is Having a Seriously Scary Summer
The theme-park chain is grappling with declining attendance, bad weather, broken rides and construction delays. Plus its hot new ride is going viral for all the wrong reasons.
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The Palantir Mafia Behind Silicon Valley’s Hottest Startups
The network connects founders and venture capitalists with ‘Palantir Pals’ and a Russian River camping trip
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U.S. Steel Plant Explosion May Have Occurred While Flushing Gas Valve
The company said pressure likely built up inside the valve, causing it to fail and leading to coke oven gas filling the area, which then exploded after being ignited.
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Winklevoss Twins’ Crypto Platform Gemini Submits Public IPO Filing
The cryptocurrency exchange plans to trade on Nasdaq under the symbol GEMI, according to a filing with the SEC.
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UnitedHealth Stock Is Having Its Best Day in Years. It Still Needs More to Cure Its Problems.
Even though Warren Buffett seems to think the value of UnitedHealth stock is about right, that doesn’t mean investors should ignore the long list of unresolved issues facing the company.
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Intel’s Move Toward Nationalization Won’t Work-at Least for the Long Haul
Federal support could get the troubled chip maker over some hurdles, but risks great harm to the U.S. tech sector.
Australian regulator sues Google over anti-competitive Search deals Reuters
Australia news LIVE: Qantas fined $90 million for illegally sacking 1800 workers; European leaders to join Zelensky in Trump meeting The Sydney Morning Herald
Google faces $35 million penalty, antitrust case in Australia over Search deals MLex
ACCC: Google admits anti-competitive conduct in Australia AdNews
Google admits to anti-competitive phone search installations Mumbrella
SINGAPORE (Reuters) -The dollar dithered on Monday ahead of a key meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskiy, while investors also looked ahead to the Federal Reserve’s Jackson Hole symposium for more policy clues.
Currency moves were largely subdued in the early Asia session, though the dollar steadied after last week’s fall as traders further pared back bets of a jumbo Fed cut next month.
The euro was little changed at $1.1705, while sterling edged up 0.07% to $1.3557.
Against a basket of currencies, the dollar advanced slightly to 97.85, after losing 0.4% last week.
Markets are now pricing in an 84% chance the Fed would ease rates by a quarter point next month, down from 98% last week, after a raft of data including a jump in U.S. wholesale prices last month and a solid increase in July’s retail sales figures dimmed the prospect of an oversized 50-basis-point cut.
“While the data don’t all point in the same direction, the U.S. economy looks to be in okay shape in the third quarter,” said Bill Adams, chief economist at Comerica Bank.
“The Fed is likely to cut interest rates by year-end, either in September, when markets now price in a cut, or a few months later, when Comerica forecasts a cut.”
The main event for investors on Monday is a meeting between Trump and Zelenskiy, who will be joined by some European leaders, as Washington presses Ukraine to accept a quick peace deal to end Europe’s deadliest war in 80 years.
Trump is leaning on Zelenskiy to strike an agreement after he met Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin in Alaska and emerged more aligned with Moscow on seeking a peace deal instead of a ceasefire first.
Also key for markets this week will be the Kansas City Federal Reserve’s August 21-23 Jackson Hole symposium, where Fed Chair Jerome Powell is due to speak on the economic outlook and the central bank’s policy framework.
“I think (Powell) will also talk about the current economic conditions in the U.S., and that will be more policy relevant, that will be more interesting to markets,” said Joseph Capurso, head of international and sustainable economics at Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
“Given market pricing is very high for a rate cut in September, I think the risk is that Powell is hawkish, or is perceived to be hawkish, if he gives a balanced view of the U.S. economy.”
In other currencies, the dollar rose 0.11% against the yen to 147.34, after falling roughly 0.4% last week.
Japan’s government on Friday brushed aside rare and explicit comments from U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent who said the Bank of Japan was “behind the curve” on policy, which appeared to be aimed at pressuring the country’s central bank into raising interest rates.
