HONG KONG (Standard&Poor's) Dec. 23, 2008--Standard&Poor's Ratings Services said today that its ratings on DBS Bank Ltd. (AA-/Stable/A-1+) were not affected by the bank's announcement of its proposed rights issue of Singapore dollar 4 billion. Standard&Poor's recognizes that this rights issue will strengthen DBS' capitalization, by improving its ratio of adjusted total equity to adjusted assets by about 1.5%, from 7.59% at the end of September 2008. This capital raising would mitigate, to a certain extent, the higher asset provisioning that is expected to arise from the recessionary conditions in its two key markets of Singapore and Hong Kong in 2009. We expect a rise in corporate and small to medium-sized enterprise defaults to
