Singapore Court to Rule on Bloomberg Defamation Suit
Loss by top officials would be a historic first
By: Andy Wong Ming Jun
A Singapore High Court is due to rule shortly on a landmark defamation suit with implications for the island state’s relationship with international media. On May 22, the Court heard concluding arguments in the suit, in which Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam and Manpower Minister Tan See Leng are suing Bloomberg, the world’s premier business reporting service, for a December 2024 article about the increasingly secretive nature of Singapore’s ultra-luxury Good Class Bungalow (GCB) property market. The presiding High Court Justice Audrey Lim has reserved her verdict for an as-yet undetermined date.
The case also bears watching because Singapore officials, and particularly the Lee family dynasty, have used the courts in defamation and contempt cases to pursue journalists, including many international news organizations and opposition politicians, to tamp down dissenting voices. No official has ever lost a defamation case in the Singapore courts. If in this case Justice Lim were to rule against Shanmugam and Tan, observers say, it could be the harbinger of a new direction for the government and the courts under Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, who took power almost exactly a year ago, succeeding Lee Hsien Loong, who stepped down after two decades in office.
The ire of the two cabinet ministers was triggered by a story citing their lucrative property transactions by Bloomberg journalist Dexter Low De Wei, titled “Singapore Mansion Deals Are Increasingly Shrouded in Secrecy.” Tan in 2023 purchased a S$27.3 million (US$21.3 million) GCB located within the Brizay Park enclave, while Shanmugam had sold his Astrid Hill GCB in August 2023 for a whopping S$88 million (US$68.7 million).
The property transactions were cited as examples to illustrate the booming yet increasingly secretive nature of Singapore’s GCB property market, which saw half of its 2024 transactions, including those of both government ministers, without publicly declared and accessible caveats. The Bloomberg article noted Singapore’s attractiveness to rich foreigners as a politically stable tax and wealth haven to purchase and own luxury properties as part of their asset portfolios. However, this is tempered by concerns about the increasing usage of shell companies and anonymous trusts to purchase multimillion-dollar GCBs, with potential negative ramifications for Singapore’s global reputation for clean and accountable financial management.
Singapore analysts say this is very much Shanmugam’s personal vendetta against Bloomberg, with Tan See Leng strung along as cover. Shanmugam’s Astrid Hill ownership status was a major sore point for him in 2023 when he, along with Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan, faced intense public and political scrutiny for their renting of state-owned colonial bungalows at allegedly below market rates and maintained on taxpayer dollars.
Shanmugam’s Astrid Hill GCB sale in August 2024 came almost three years after it was first put on sale in November 2021, and one month after his parliamentary grilling which ultimately saw no wrongdoing declared on both ministers’ part although somewhat embarassingly it emerged that Shanmugam acknowledged in testimony that he had sold his house for S$88 million at 10 times profit to a buyer who did not use a bank loan and that he didn’t know the buyer’s identity, generating much comments on social media.
The Online Citizen’s Terry Xu first broke the news of Shanmugam’s secretive offloading of the home in September 2024, with subsequently-leaked property sale documents confirming the S$88 million price tag footed by the anonymous buyer, acting via a trust managed by UBS Trustees (Singapore) Ltd.
In its legal defense, Bloomberg argued that its reporting concerned matters of public interest, including rising GCB prices, the use of trust structures in property purchases, and transparency in property ownership increasingly held by newly naturalized Singapore citizens. Invoking the principle of “responsible journalism”, Senior Counsel Sreenivasan Narayanan maintained that Bloomberg’s article did not accuse the ministers of wrongdoing, money laundering, or dishonesty.
Bloomberg also argued that the article’s language was qualified and that readers would not interpret it as defamatory, given the factual truth of both ministers’ GCB property transactions, lacking publicly-declared and accessible caveats. Shanmugam had also confirmed under cross-examination that he, along with his lawyers and bankers, had no idea as to the identity of the anonymous buyer who had netted him ten times’ profit on his GCB’s original value.
That was immediately countered by Tan and Shanmugam’s lawyer, senior counsel Davinder Singh, who argued that Bloomberg’s article had implied inadequate anti-money laundering safeguards in Singapore’s property market and portrayed the ministers negatively. Singh charged that Bloomberg had selectively framed facts, with Dexter Low inserting “political fodder” into the narrative and deliberately linking the ministers to suspicious property dealings with a pen “dipped in gall”.
Citing internal Bloomberg communications which suggested the ministers’ intentional targeting in the offending article, Singh also claimed that Bloomberg had attempted to suppress communications from being used as evidence on top of demonstrating “unprecedented” malice and determination to harm the two government ministers.
The attribution of “unprecedented malice and determination to hurt” supposedly stemmed from Bloomberg’s refusal to comply with a POFMA “Fake News” Correction Notice issued by Shanmugam’s then-second in command Edwin Tong at the Ministry of Law in December 2024 over Low’s article. Bloomberg chose to publish the demanded correction notice in the spirit of “right to reply,” but robustly stood by it. In an ironic demonstration of the Barbara Streisand effect, the Correction Notice publication requirements, as well as Shanmugam’s excoriations on social media resulted in Bloomberg making an originally-paywalled article free to read for a global audience.
Critics note that none of the facts in the article are in dispute. They say the entire premise of the suit hinges in large part on the plaintiffs’ selective reading and interpretation of the Bloomberg article as offensive. In effect, Singapore’s High Court is being asked to pass judgment on whether the subjective reading of factual circumstances as a cited example should be given “beyond reasonable doubt” legal weight in defamation claims. Yet one can only take offence and not give it, as crystallized in the idiom of “seeing a bow reflected as a snake in a water cup (杯弓蛇影)” invoked by Dexter Low in court to illustrate his having no hidden agenda of malice against Shanmugam.
If the court rules in favour of the ministers, it could set a significant precedent affecting how media organizations report on high-profile individuals in Singapore, particularly where financial transparency and political figures intersect. It may also influence how future disputes between public officials and the press are interpreted under defamation law in a tightening regulatory environment.
This is exemplified by Singapore’s recently enacted Online Safety (Relief and Accountability) Act, with the newly formed Online Safety Commission and its commissioner being directly subjugated under the Ministry of Law. Among the 13 categories of “online harms” under its oversight and enforcement is a particular one defined as “publication of statement harmful to reputation”. It enables, with trivial ease, the ability of government ministers in Singapore to wield the full weight of the state against any critical media reportage or even anonymous online criticisms they deem as harmful to their reputation.
Obi-Wan Kenobi on Singapore: "You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy."