About the project

The Singapore Academy of Law’s Law Reform Committee reviewed the Bills of Sale Act (Chapter 24, 1985 Revised Edition; now the 2011 Revised Edition) and made various recommendations to modernise the law relating to personal property security, including the following:

• The Act should be replaced by a comprehensive personal property security law applicable whether the property to be subject to a security interest is goods or a chose in action and whether the debtor is a corporate or non-corporate person.
• The new law should lay down uniform requirements for the creation of a security interest, whether possessory or non-possessory in nature.
• When several security interests are created in the same property, their priorities should depend on whether, in the case of a possessory interest, the collateral has been taken into possession; and in the case of a non-possessory interest, a financing statement describing the transaction creating it has been filed. As a general rule, priority should be given to that interest in respect of which all the necessary steps for securing priority were first taken and completed.

Project status: Completed

• The report was published in 1996.
• The report was cited in Hans Tjio, “Debentures and Charges” in Hans Tjio, Pearlie Koh & Lee Pey Woan, Corporate Law (Singapore: Academy Publishing, 2015), 681 at page 724, paragraph 14.058, footnote 218; and at page 764, paragraph 14.117, footnote 417, the author noting in the latter case that a first-to-file charge registration system for companies, which had been explored in the report in the context of the Bills of Sale Act applicable to security granted by individuals, is “probably still a bridge too far for the relevant authorities”.

Areas of law

◾ Property law

Click on the image above to view the report

Last updated 13 June 2019