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ANNOUNCEMENT(S)

FEBRUARY 2023

Happy Lunar New Year and Gong Xi Fa Cai!  I hope everyone has had a great start to the year.  

The weeks since our 40th year anniversary events in late November have raced by.  To those of you who joined us for the 15th RAIF Conference, our annual Commercial Arbitration Symposium, and our 40th Anniversary gala dinner, thank you for your resounding support.  There was a strong feeling of camaraderie that week among Singapore-based members and friends and we were reminded of our growing constituencies of international members.  It is a tremendous encouragement that so many of you travelled to Singapore to attend. 

SIArb is the product of the cumulative efforts of its volunteers over the decades and has come a long way. This includes the outstanding work of our Secretariat team, led by June Tan, which has also made enduring contributions to our organisation for the recent third of its lifespan.  Our Secretariat has a tough job as it supports our ever growing committees of volunteers brimming with ideas.  They work tirelessly in the background and have helped our past and present Councils raise standards of our activities and events over the years.  During covid in particular, June and her team played a major role in ensuring that we continued to be able to deliver our annual training programmes in alternative formats and at a high standard.  Indeed, many of you have singled out June to me and others for praise and we should not forget the many less well known members of the team handling membership administration, finance, IT and marketing, whom we have also treated as part of the SIArb family.  

As mentioned in the speeches at our 40th anniversary, SIArb expects to continue to pursue initiatives that seek to raise the value of association for our members.  We are committed to adding to and enhancing our already popular training courses.  As covid recedes and travel picks up, we will do our best to accommodate an increasing number of requests for joint activities with other international arbitral institutions.  

We announced in November that SIArb has donated a gold medal prize for one of the NUS law school’s postgraduate arbitration programmes as a way to commemorate our 40th anniversary.  In this connection, and through our new Young Practitioners Network, we hope to expand our outreach to younger lawyers and to our next generations of leaders.  SIArb welcomes your ideas and suggestions for what other initiatives your Council should be exploring.

We wish everyone a safe, happy and prosperous Year of the Rabbit and look forward to our next opportunity to meet.