Temasek's portfolio was worth S$127 billion, or US$85 billion, at the end of November, down 31 percent from the end of March. Lim Hwee Hua, senior minister of state with the finance ministry, confirmed the figures to Parliament on Tuesday, news wires reported.

The decline is broadly in line with the performance of the world's stock markets last year: the MSCI World index fell 38 percent over the same period in US dollar terms, Bloomberg News said.

Temasek, which has a wide-ranging portfolio spanning financial services, telecommunications, media, infrastructure and other sectors, is nursing losses from high-profile investments that it made in Merrill Lynch and Barclays as it aggressively expanded outside its core Asian market.

Its $5 billion-plus investment in Merrill alone has resulted in a loss of more than $2 billion, as the bank's shares dived before the stock was delisted following the Bank of America purchase.

Temasek controls some of Singapore's most high-profile companies, including Singapore Airlines and Singapore Telecommunications, and has stakes in global companies like Standard Chartered.

Last week, Temasek announced that its chief executive, Ho Ching, would step down, to be replaced by Charles Goodyear, the former chief executive of BHP Billiton, on Oct 1.

Suppiah Dhanabalan, Temasek's chairman, said that the decision by Ho, who drove the state fund's expansion outside Singapore with acquisitions in China, Europe and the United States, to step down was not linked to performance and that it was too early to determine whether investments made in the last two years will lose out in the long term.

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