(Sept 1): Singapore has named the two former Noble Group Ltd directors who were cautioned over the company’s misleading accounts as Neil Dhar and Tim Eyre.

Last week, Singapore’s regulators fined the collapsed commodity trader S$12.6 million after a four-year investigation, and said that two former directors had been issued with “stern warnings”, but did not name them.

“The two directors who received stern warnings were Neil Timothy Dhar and Timothy Martin Eyre,” a spokesperson for the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority said in response to questions from Bloomberg News on Wednesday (Aug 31).

Noble collapsed into insolvency in 2018 after huge losses and accusations of improper accounting wiped out more than US$10 billion in market capitalisation.

Arnaud Vagner, the former Noble employee who, writing under the name “Iceberg Research”, first publicly accused Noble of inflating its profits in 2015, earlier this week criticised the Singaporean investigation. The small size of the fine and the fact that the Noble directors had not been named showed that regulators were “happy to sweep the matter under the carpet”, he said.

Dhar and Eyre are both former directors of Noble Resources International Pte, the Singaporean unit through which the company conducted much of its trading.