The US indictment of Singapore-based shipping tycoon Teo Siong Seng in a price-fixing scandal has raised questions about Washington’s determination to pursue prominent figures from friendly countries, though legal experts say the case conforms to established American antitrust practice.

Teo, the 71-year-old chief executive of Hong Kong company Singamas Container Holdings, has several prominent executive roles, including sitting as chair of the Singapore Business Federation and on the government-led Singapore Economic Resilience Taskforce, which looks into US tariffs and other global trade disruptions affecting businesses and workers in Singapore.

The Singaporean was named by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) as one of seven executives from shipping companies who allegedly price-fixed nearly all of the world’s standard dry containers between November 2019 and at least January 2024.

Based on court documents filed on January 22 and unsealed on May 19, the executives from four companies – China International Marine Containers (CIMC), CXIC Group Containers, Shanghai Universal Logistics Equipment, and a fourth, unnamed company – met at CIMC’s headquarters in Shenzhen, China, in November 2019 where they allegedly agreed to restrict their output of shipping containers, including by limiting the number of shifts and hours that each production line for containers could run daily.

According to the DOJ, the conspiracy resulted in the prices of standard shipping containers doubling between 2019 and 2021. It also caused the container manufacturers’ profits to increase by almost a hundredfold during the Covid-19 pandemic and the consequent global supply chain crisis.

Burton Ong, associate professor of law at the National University of Singapore, explained that under US antitrust law, the crime of price-fixing could be prosecuted even if the conduct took place outside the US, so long as such conduct had a “direct, substantial and reasonably foreseeable” effect on domestic commerce.