Or perhaps they are just too busy. While others might take the summer off, Temasek's people "work very, very, very, very hard" all year round, says Cheo Hock Kuan, a managing director. There is plenty to keep them at their desks at the moment. On August 3rd, Temasek bid S$2.8 billion ($1.6 billion) for the two-thirds of Neptune Orient Lines (NOL), the city state's shipping line, that it does not already own. And by the end of the month, the group is to make public its annual report for the first time in its 30-year history.

The moves are related. Aware that it has outgrown Singapore's small, maturing domestic market, Temasek is moving overseas. So far, its acquisitions and investments have mainly been in Asia, but it wants to move further afield. "We will work to transform our portfolio from a proxy for the Singapore gross domestic product, into a balanced gross national product portfolio leveraging on the growth and promise of Singapore, ASEAN, Asia and the world," declared Ms Ho, something of a visionary, it seems, in February.

Founded in 1974 to hold the government's investments in various businesses, Temasek, an old Malay name for "sea town", is an odd company. It employs 170,000 people and controls more than a fifth of the local stockmarket, including a large chunk of Singapore's industry and infrastructure, and all or part of well-known companies such as Singapore Airlines, SingTel, Singapore Technologies, and DBS Bank.

Capitalism, Singapore style

While governments elsewhere have mainly privatised their industries, Temasek is still lapping them up. And now it is snaffling up firms in other countries, too. It remains, however, wholly owned by the finance ministry. Think General Electric owned by the American Treasury. As Temasek spreads its wings abroad, the questioning of its lack of transparency, as well as of its government support and investment record, can only get louder.

To some of these questions and concerns answers might start to dribble out, though since they may provide more fuel to Temasek's critics, it would be foolish to expect much more openness. Too little, and Temasek will find that investors are unwilling to give it money; but too much might lead to questions about its raison d'être. Temasek needs external capital to help fund its expansion. That will require more transparency. Making public the annual report, for example, is a step to getting a credit rating from Standard & Poor's and Moody's, two big rating agencies, so it can issue international bonds.

But greater transparency would in turn mean that Temasek's investment record can be better scrutinised. Superficially, it is good. The company's enviable collection of assets, combined with what Temasek claims is a management philosophy of maximising shareholder value, has produced some notable successes. Singapore Airlines is one of the best-regarded, most profitable airlines in the world; PSA its largest container-port operator, with operating margins of 30%. And Keppel and SembCorp are global leaders in specialised oil rigs and tanker repair. In February, Temasek claimed that its total shareholder return had averaged an impressive 18% over the past 30 years.

Following the appointment of Ms Ho, Temasek has been rapidly building up its "external wing". Ms Ho sees banking, telecoms, transport, education and healthcare as areas ripe for consolidation. Since her arrival, Temasek has spent $1.5 billion buying stakes in banks in Indonesia, South Korea and India, a 5% holding in Telekom Malaysia, a controlling 62% stake in Global Crossing, an American telecoms firm, and a chunk of Quintiles, an American clinical-drug trial company.

But there may be less to Temasek's track record than meets the eye. A study earlier this year by LEK, a consultancy, found that Temasek's 22 major listed companies had made an average return of only 1.7% a year since their respective listings. And Ms Ho herself has admitted that Temasek's return had dropped to 13% a year over the past decade. By contrast GE, which does not receive the same favourable treatment from a friendly government, managed 27% a year over the same period.

Moreover, many of Temasek's best-performing investments are either monopolies or operate in protected markets with favourable regulation. The capital costs of the city's metro system, for example, have been borne directly by the government, allowing SMRT, the operator, to undercut its private-sector rival ComfortDelgro. Chartered Semiconductor, Singapore's attempt to get into making microchips, has been given lots of tax breaks. Given such support, the crown jewels in its portfolio, the zealousness with which they have been protected, and the rapidity with which Singapore grew in the 1970s and 1980s, it should have made much more money.

Worse, when Temasek or its subsidiaries have ventured overseas or had serious competition, they have often flopped. DBS overpaid for its purchase of Hong Kong's Dao Heng Bank, argue analysts, while SingTel's acquisition of Optus, an Australian telecoms company, and NOL's of American President Lines, a rival shipping company, have taken years to come right. Singapore Airlines's investment in Air New Zealand was a disaster and had to be written off after the latter went bankrupt, as was SingTel's in C2C, an underwater-cable operator. The biggest lossmaker, however, has been Chartered Semiconductor which, with inferior technology to Taiwanese rivals, has bled money for much of the past three years and had to be bailed out by Temasek in 2002.

Fed up with complaints from outside shareholders, and concerned that her chastened executives would no longer seize opportunities, Ms Ho has started using 100%-owned subsidiaries to expand. The NOL bid is the latest example. The container-shipping industry is consolidating and NOL, as the seventh largest, is too small to survive on its own. Owning the whole company will make it easier for Temasek to control its destiny.

But buying out other shareholders and delisting companies' shares fly in the face of the privatisation strategy espoused a few years ago. They also sit oddly with Temasek's talk of becoming more open. Buying up entire companies rather than investing in listed ones will, if anything, make Temasek more opaque, not less. And even the rating agencies are struggling to understand what goes on at the company, which will not obviously reassure outside investors nor, indeed, Singapore's taxpayers.

Temasek says it is becoming a competitive and transparent global investment company. But at heart it is still a prime example of Asia's paternalistic capitalism: a government-owned collection of assets that operate largely in protected markets with a whiff of nepotism, and one that will find its addiction to secrecy very hard to break.

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