A Singapore court has ordered Bloomberg and one of its reporters to pay S$460,000 ($356,000; £266,000) to two ministers who had sued them for defamation over an article referencing their property transactions.
Last year, the ministers, K Shanmugam and Tan See Leng, sued Bloomberg and reporter Low De Wei for a 2024 article which had mentioned their property deals.
Bloomberg said it did not imply any wrongdoing and had used them as examples of a broader trend. They have not commented on the verdict.
The judge found that when read as a whole, the piece implied wrongdoing by the ministers as it also mentioned secrecy and money laundering.
What did the article say?
The piece titled “Singapore Mansion Deals Are Increasingly Shrouded in Secrecy” looked at the ways in which some wealthy buyers in Singapore obscured their purchases of Good Class Bungalows – a category of multimillion-dollar mansions in Singapore – such as by using shell companies which hide their identities.
It reported that Shanmugam, the Coordinating Minister for National Security and former law minister, had sold a bungalow for S$88m ($68m; £51m) to an unnamed buyer using a trust.
The piece also noted that Tan, the Minister for Manpower, had bought a Good Class Bungalow for around S$27m – citing him as one example among a list of other public figures who had bought luxury estates through an arrangement known as a non-caveated deal, that makes it harder to track who is involved in the transaction.
Why did the ministers sue?
Days after the article was published in December 2024, the ministers announced that they would take legal action.
During the trial in April, the minister and their lawyers argued that the mention of the ministers in the article unfairly associated their property deals with those covered in the rest of the article, which included concerns about transparency and money laundering.
Shanmugam also argued that the Bloomberg article was written to target him and publish news about the sale of his property.
Bloomberg and Low argued that the story did not imply any wrongdoing by the ministers, but rather listed them as “newsworthy examples” of bungalow deals.
The ministers had given the piece the “most defamatory” reading, as opposed to what an ordinary reader would do, Bloomberg’s lawyers said.
They added that the article had gone through extensive research and verification, and its reporter had sought comment from the ministers multiple times.
In her verdict, High Court judge Audrey Lim said that the “natural and ordinary meaning” of the article is that the ministers “took advantage” of existing regulations to deal their properties in a “non-transparent manner”, and that they did so “to avoid scrutiny that might extend to the possibility of money laundering”.
“These are grave assertions that directly impugn the claimants’ personal integrity, character, and professional reputation” Lim said, adding that this was a factor in the awarding of the damages.
Separate to the defamation case, Singaporean authorities ordered Bloomberg to put up a “correction notice” on the article, under its Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA).
Introduced by the government in 2019 to tackle misinformation, the anti-fake news law mandates correction notices to be tagged onto online content deemed by authorities as false – though some argue that it is often invoked to target criticisms of the government.
Bloomberg complied with the POFMA order but added a note to say that while it was required to publish the government’s note “under threat of sanction”, it stood by its reporting.
POFMA correction notices were also issued to news outlets that had either reshared the Bloomberg story or published commentaries on it.
Shanmugam and Tan also succesfully filed a defamation suit against the editor-in-chief of local independent outlet The Online Citizen, over a commentary he had published about the Bloomberg piece.
Singapore’s leaders have long been successful in suing its critics and foreign news outlets for defamation. Such actions, they maintain, are to protect their reputations – though critics say they in fact stifle political dissent.
In 2009, the Far Eastern Economic Review, a now-defunct Asian business magazine, was forced to pay more than S$400,000 after a court ruled that one of its articles had defamed then prime minister Lee Hsien Loong and his father – also Singapore’s first prime minister – Lee Kuan Yew.
The Economist and the New York Times are among other foreign outlets that have been ordered to pay damages in defamation suits.
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