There are few reasons to expect Singapore Airlines to score well in an international survey of corporate governance. Not only does it operate in a region that traditionally scores poorly on most measures of disclosure and transparency, it is also owned by Temasek Holdings, Singapore’s secretive state investment agency, which only this year produced an annual report - the first in its nearly 30 years of existence.

Yet, it seems that if Singapore Airlines has not exactly done well, it is at least doing better than most in its sector. The study by Institutional Shareholder Services showed that on corporate governance the company outperformed 73.9 per cent of the companies in the FTSE Developed World Index and 69 per cent of companies in the transportation group.