Malaysia’s former prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin won a significant court victory on Tuesday after he was acquitted of four charges linked to a government programme set up to help contractors during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Kuala Lumpur High Court cleared Muhyiddin of three money-laundering charges and one of abuse of power involving 200 million ringgit (US$49.1 million), after prosecutors said they no longer wanted to pursue those counts in his Jana Wibawa trial. The ruling removes four of...

Amilo has completed its fourth acquisition in four years, folding Vietnam-based cross-border specialist SG Link into its network as it chases a bigger prize: becoming the operating layer for Southeast Asian merchants selling overseas. SG Link, now rebranded ShipX, connects sellers to more than 220 destinations and pools shipment volumes so smaller exporters can access freight rates […] The post Ecosystem Roundup: Amilo’s fourth buyout in four years bets on cross-border shipping appeared first on e27.

Southeast Asia’s e-wallet giants have spent a decade making digital payments boring, in the best sense. Tap to pay, scan a QR code, top up a prepaid line: no jargon, no friction, no need to understand what happens underneath. Now TrueMoney wants to apply the same trick to blockchain. The Ascend Money-backed fintech, Thailand’s leading […] The post TrueMoney and Fireblocks want Thai users on blockchain rails without them noticing appeared first on e27.

Months after deadly clashes that cost dozens of lives along their shared border, the foreign ministers of Cambodia and Thailand laid out opening arguments on Tuesday over a different kind of territory: 27,000 sq km (10,400 square miles) of seabed thought to hold a fortune in gas and oil. The venue was the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s Singapore office, where the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea’s conciliation commission is being asked to settle who controls a stretch of the...

Purbaya ⁠Yudhi Sadewa, who was sacked as Indonesia’s finance minister this week, said on Tuesday he was upset to be removed from his job, but was half expecting the decision. President Prabowo Subianto abruptly removed Purbaya as finance minister on Monday and named his deputy, Suahasil Nazara, to the top finance job, in a move that surprised markets but was ‌also seen as an attempt to restore trust in financial policies. After a terse handover ceremony at the finance ministry, Purbaya told...

The US Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) on Monday announced funding for a feasibility study on a new transpacific submarine cable linking the US with Thailand and as many as five other Southeast Asian nations, as Washington seeks to expand secure digital infrastructure in the region. The proposed cable that could extend up to 18,507km (11,500 miles) long would connect Thailand with the United States via Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam, “while avoiding the South...

OpenAI has appointed Sanjay Deshmukh as its first Vice President of Asia Pacific sales, a hire that signals the ChatGPT maker is moving beyond product launches and into the harder work of building an enterprise sales machine across one of its fastest-growing markets. Based in Singapore, Deshmukh will lead OpenAI’s commercial efforts across the region […] The post OpenAI hires former Elastic and Snowflake exec Sanjay Deshmukh to lead Asia Pacific sales appeared first on e27.

The mother of Malaysian schoolgirl Yap Shing Xuen has shared a moving tribute to her late daughter, who was stabbed to death nearly a year ago in a school toilet. On Monday, the Shah Alam High Court found Yap’s attacker, who was 14 at the time, not guilty of her murder on the grounds of insanity. Medical testimony accepted by the court established that the boy had severe undiagnosed schizophrenia since the age of nine. He was ordered into psychiatric confinement, where he will remain...

Asian and global stocks declined today as the benchmark US 10-year Treasury yield climbed above the critical five per cent threshold. That level pressures risk assets because it raises the discount rate applied to future corporate earnings. Semiconductor shares sold off sharply, dragging technology-heavy indices from Tokyo to New York. Investors are weighing two overlapping […] The post The CLARITY Act vote could send crypto to US$2.73T or crash it to US$2.6T appeared first on e27.

For all the talk of Tokyo’s growing openness to international founders, language still shapes how quickly doors open in Japan’s startup community. English-friendly meetups and conferences are far more common than they were a decade ago, but according to a new guide from Blackbox JP, the first few sentences a founder says in Japanese, however […] The post The 90-second pitch that helps foreign founders crack Tokyo’s networking scene appeared first on e27.