Always wondered why and how the city of Singapore became a financial centre. Perhaps its genesis lies with the city of London. Now part of the question can be answered. Courtesy of Wolf Street's World's Worst Tax Haven to Expand Its Operations:
Unbeknownst to even many Brits, the “City of London Corporation” has functioned for centuries as an offshore island inside Britain, even inside London, a tax haven in its own right,
... Not only is the City of London paradise on earth for rights-seeking corporations; it is also the rotten, beating heart of a vast, secretive financial web cast across the globe. As Shaxson points out, each of the Web’s sections – the individual havens in the Caribbean and elsewhere (all of them Crown dependencies) – trap passing money and business from nearby jurisdictions and feed them up to the City, just as a spider catches a fly.
Corporations in the city of London, which are mostly financial types, are able to vote as an entity in council elections. Each entity is able to garner a certain number of votes. The bigger the corporation the more votes. Sort of like the functional constituency sector in Hong Kong.
Think of how Singapore became a financial centre. The city consistently blows its trumpets by saying that its success was built on people because of its lack of natural resources. All these years, it is a known fact that individuals and businesses from the nearby region park most of their funds in financial institutions in the city.