Sheng Siong gets nod to buy markets

THE Government has given Sheng Siong supermarket chain the green light to take over five wet markets – which will stay as wet markets.

Both the Housing Board and Sheng Siong confirmed that the buyout has gone through, in response to queries by The Straits Times yesterday.

The deal will be finalised early next month, once the legal process for the transaction has been completed.

Sheng Siong purchased the five markets – located at Choa Chu Kang Street 62, Choa Chu Kang Avenue 1, Serangoon Avenue 3, Bukit Batok West Avenue 8 and Fajar Road – from a company called Heeton Holdings earlier this year.

But a hitch occurred when it became known that Sheng Siong wanted to convert the wet markets into air-conditioned markets, triggering public concern about the shrinking number of wet markets in Singapore.

Government leaders weighed in and the Housing Board stepped in to say the premises could not be turned into supermarkets, adding that it had yet to approve the sale.

Now that it has been given the green light, the company is taking tentative steps in its new role as a wet market operator.

But while the wet markets will stay, the same cannot be said for the stallholders now operating in the five markets.

Mr Lim Hock Chee, Sheng Siong’s managing director, said he will maintain rental prices for the current stallholders from next month till March.

Stallholders running eight out of the 130 stalls in the five markets are leaving by the end of the month, according to Mr Lim. They include five from the Fajar Road market in Bukit Panjang.

Stallholders interviewed said they were told by Sheng Siong that their rents will increase after March, but it was said the hike would not be as high as 100 per cent.

Mr Lim would only say that the rent for the rest of the year will be decided once the sale of the markets has been finalised.

One stallholder who is staying for now is Mr Bek Seng Seong, 54, a fishmonger at the Fajar Road market. He said: ‘We are staying because we have no place to go. But we don’t feel secure. If they increase the rent even by 10 per cent, we will suffer.’

Mr Bek, who has been operating his stall at the market for more than a decade, pays about $2,400 a month in rent. He said his monthly profit is $1,000, barely enough to support his family.

The HDB reiterated that it ‘does not intervene in rent negotiations between the stallholders and Sheng Siong as they are private commercial arrangements’.

Source: Straits Times, 18 Dec 2009