Press Still 0, Singapore Government Unanimous in Court
Bloomberg News the latest to fall in lawsuits by island republic officials
Singapore officials have preserved an unbeaten streak in libel and contempt of court cases against the international press and local opposition leaders that began in the 1980s. Justice Audrey Lim on July 14 awarded Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam and Manpower Minister Tan See Leng damages of S$230,000 (US$177,874) each for defamation by a leading global business reporting organization Bloomberg and its reporter, Low De Wei.
As nearly as it can be determined, Singapore officials have never lost a case in their own courts against international journalists or opposition politicians since 1983, when then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew sacked a sitting judge and moved him to a backwater after the judge ruled against the government in a case involving then opposition leader Joshua B Jeyaretnam. Nor have they filed one outside their own jurisdiction. The current case has been closely watched by press organizations to see if Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, who took over a year ago from Lee Hsien Loong, the last representative of the Lee clan, to see if if Wong’s administration would cut the courts some unofficial slack in their decisions involving opponents. It was not to be.
“We are alarmed by Tuesday’s court decision, which will chill public interest reporting,” said Asia-Pacific Director Beh Lih Yi of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists in a prepared release. “As a regional financial and media hub, Singapore must show it is open for business and public scrutiny, including of property transaction deals. Singaporean public officials should cease using defamation laws to target the media for their reporting.”
The Paris-based Reporters Without Borders condemned the ruling as a “textbook SLAPP suit against @Bloomberg and journalist #LowDeWei” and demanded that authorities “end their legal harassment of trustworthy journalists.”
SLAPP (strategic lawsuits against public participation) are lawsuits intended to censor, intimidate or silence critics by saddling them with expensive damages and legal costs.
In ruling against Bloomberg and its reporter, Justice Lim said the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and the Human Rights Act (UK) do not apply in Singapore.
Bloomberg and Low argued that, if the article was found to be defamatory, they were entitled to rely on the Reynolds privilege — a defence developed in English defamation law — because they had exercised their duty to communicate important information to the general public.
Justice Lim rejected that argument. She said the Singapore Court of Appeal had previously held that the Reynolds privilege is not part of Singapore law, but was a development brought about by the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and the Human Rights Act (UK).
In the current case, stemming from a December 2024 news story titled Singapore Mansion Deals Are Increasingly Shrouded in Secrecy by Bloomberg, the facts were not in dispute. The references to Shanmugam and Tan appeared to be factual, only pointing out their roles in the transactions and raising puzzlement on why they chose to file suit. Rather, the case involved the question of whether it should have been written at all. Tan in 2023 purchased a S$27.3 million (US$21.3 million) Good Class Bungalow, the most expensive and prestigious landed housing, 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, the article noted, 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. Indeed, somewhat embarrassingly, 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.
Singapore analysts describe this as 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.
Justice Lim, however, agreed with the powerful home minister, rejecting Bloomberg’s argument that the article merely examined a broader trend of non-caveated GCB transactions and that the ministers were cited only as examples. Instead, according to local media, Lim said the article, when read as a whole, linked the ministers’ transactions with claims about secrecy, opacity and money laundering, creating a defamatory impression.
After the story ran, the Singapore government ran into a newly intractable problem. Officials first invoked Singapore’s notorious Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA), giving individual ministers the power to decide what constitutes a “falsehood” and issue correction directions, rather than submitting the issues to a test by impartial legal bodies when evaluating criticisms. The article, the two said, “attack[s] the transparency of property transactions in Singapore” and demanded that it be taken down, with the government’s statement to be printed prominently on its website.
Almost unheard of for a major news organization, Bloomberg refused to back down, saying on December 20, 2024: “Under Singapore’s Prevention of Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act, Bloomberg is required under threat of sanction to publish this Correction Direction. Bloomberg respectfully disagrees with it and reserves its right to appeal and challenge the Correction Direction. We stand by our reporting.” It later retracted the article on the Singapore government’s orders.
In other cases, when press organizations ignored the order, the government ordered their publications and websites banned in Singapore. Bloomberg’s challenge dared the government to block its electronic transmissions into the island republic, which would have resulted in havoc in the business community. Its terminals, the essential tool for professional traders and investors, are in virtually every financial office in Singapore, providing crucial real-time data and articles on almost every financial transaction that takes place anywhere on the globe. Without that information, Singapore’s financial industry, which competes with Hong Kong as Asia’s premier financial center, would have simply come to a stop.
There the matter stopped until the two ministers decided to file suit for defamation, a potent weapon in its own right as borne out by Justice Lim’s decision. Both posted on Facebook that they considered the piece to be libelous and indicated on December 16 that they would be issuing Letters of Demand to Bloomberg and other outlets that reproduced the article in whole or in part.
In a statement published by Bloomberg News, the US company’s chief editor John Micklethwait said it was “very disappointed by this ruling but we will of course respect it.” Bloomberg, he said, “We at trial that our reporting was accurate and served an important public interest, and we continue to believe that the ministers have imposed an extremely strained meaning on what was a solid story. “Our newsroom – and our reporter – conducted themselves with integrity, and met all our editorial standards in preparing the story at the center of this trial. We continue to stand by them.”