Recovery is a race against information. By the time a cause of action accrues, the asset a creditor hopes to execute against has typically already moved once, through a related entity, a foreign account, a nominee structure, or a digital wallet; and it is often moved again while the claim is still being prepared. The law’s answer to that problem is not a single remedy but a sequenced toolkit seeking to identify, disclose, preserve, trace and recover assets. The first two stages, converting suspicion into a workable asset map, are the subject of this article. The next will turn to locking the assets down.
Starting from the public record
The first move is investigative: a search of ACRA filings, the charges register, land titles, eLitigation, insolvency notices and open-source material, conducted without any court order. Done well, this exercise does three things at once. It scales the legal effort to what is realistically recoverable, it surfaces the related entities and nominees through whom assets may be held, and it builds the pattern of suspicious transfers that will later support a case of real risk of dissipation of assets. It also identifies the gap: the information the public record cannot supply, which is where disclosure via the courts begins.
Three routes to disclosure
Where the public record runs out, a creditor typically reaches for one of three disclosure vehicles, each raising a different question.
If the respondent is already before the court, most often having been served with a freezing order, ancillary disclosure under section 4(10) of the Civil Law Act 1909 is the natural route: the question is simply whether disclosure is “just and convenient” as an adjunct to the injunction already granted. In Three Arrows Capital Ltd v Davies [2024] SGHC 164, the Court treated the disclosure order as an important part of the preservation package; and dismissed the application to discharge the freezing injunction and stay the disclosure order. CLM v CLN [2022] 5 SLR 273 (“CLM v CLN”) shows the mechanism of a disclosure order working against cryptocurrency exchanges already joined to the action.
If instead the target is a non-party who holds or has processed the assets (a bank, an exchange, a payment intermediary) and the applicant is trying to trace property to which it has a proprietary claim, the route is Bankers Trust relief under Order 11 rule 11.
There may be situations where the applicant does not yet know who to sue and needs the third party’s help to find out, e.g., where a fraudulent counterparty transacted through a corporate service provider or platform that holds the true identity behind an alias, shell entity, or account used to perpetrate the fraud. In such cases, the route is a Norwich Pharmacal order, also under Order 11 rule 11, on the ‘justness underpinned by necessity’ standard set out in Dorsey James Michael v World Sport Group Pte Ltd [2014] 2 SLR 208 and assessed against the multi-factorial checklist in Imas Pharmaceuticals Ltd v DealStreetAsia Pte Ltd [2017] 4 SLR 684: seriousness of the loss, whether the claim rests on fact or speculation, degree of relevance, scope of information sought, nexus to Singapore and balancing confidentiality needs against the applicant’s interests. L’Oreal v Shopee Singapore Pte Ltd [2025] 4 SLR 145 is a recent reminder that the obligation of the party providing disclosure is one of sufficiency, not perfection: a platform that answers to the best of its knowledge and belief will not readily be ordered to investigate further.
Banking secrecy after Alliance Divine Impex
Disclosure applications against banks deserve particular care. The recent case of Alliance Divine Impex Pte Ltd v Arulappan Tony [2025] 3 SLR 68 confirmed that the starting point for any application against a non-party bank is banking secrecy under section 47(1) of the Banking Act. The practical route through the secrecy regime entails a three-step framework: Is the material a banker’s book? Is there an underlying legal proceeding? Should the court, in its discretion, order inspection? As regards the requirement for underlying proceedings, Alliance Divine Impex held that the applicant’s earlier pre-action disclosure proceedings (in which the applicant had already obtained an order against the respondent personally requiring production of the bank statements, which the respondent had failed to comply with) constituted the relevant legal proceedings.
Bankers Trust carries a further requirement on top of the secrecy point: the order is only available where the applicant asserts a proprietary claim to the assets being traced, and a personal claim in conversion or unjust enrichment will not do.
CLLPMA and persons unknown
Two developments have upgraded what is available before any court order is sought. The Companies and Limited Liability Partnerships (Miscellaneous Amendments) Act 2024, in force since 16 June 2025, has materially upgraded the public record: controllers’ registers are now earlier and more granular, foreign companies must maintain nominee director registers, nominee arrangements must be disclosed to ACRA, and nominee status is now flagged on public business profiles. For a creditor facing a layered structure, more of the picture is now visible without a court order, and where the registers have not been updated as the Act requires, that gap is itself evidence to be deployed at the preservation stage.
Separately, Singapore law permits proceedings and interim relief against defendants who cannot yet be named, provided they can be described with sufficient certainty to distinguish those caught from those who are not. CLM v CLN and Janesh s/o Rajkumar v Unknown Person (CHEFPIERRE) [2023] 3 SLR 1191, the latter concerning an NFT transferred by a defendant known only as “chefpierre.eth”, confirm that a claimant is not barred from suing or seeking urgent relief merely because the wrongdoer is identified only by a wallet address or an online handle. The description must still be specific enough to fix who falls inside the class and who does not; a defendant described only as “persons who participated in the conspiracy” will not pass muster. Service of the court papers then follows the same purposive logic – and can be effected by NFT, by email to a known address, or by posting to the platform on which the wallet is hosted.
The duty that applies to every route
Every without-notice application on this list carries the same running risk: the duty of full and frank disclosure. The applicant must identify the points the respondent would raise against it, not merely those in its favour, and must explain honestly why the application is brought without notice at all. Goh Seng Heng v Liberty Sky Investments Ltd [2017] 2 SLR 1113 provides a clear illustration of what happens when that discipline fails: the Court of Appeal set aside a bank-disclosure order because the applicant had not told the respondent about the application even though his identity and whereabouts were known.
There are various tools that can be employed in an asset recovery exercise, each depending on the facts of the case. This article has outlined some tools for identifying assets. The next in this series turns to holding the money once it has been found – including by way of freezing injunctions against the debtor or its nominees.
