Press Still 0, Singapore Government Unanimous in Court

Bloomberg News the latest to fall in lawsuits by island republic officials

Singapore officials have extended their unbeaten streak in domestic libel and contempt of court cases against the international press and local opposition leaders stemming from the 1980s with a decision by High Court Justice Audrey Lim, who 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 the leading global business reporting organisation Bloomberg and its reporter, Dexter Low De Wei.

As nearly as it can be determined, Singapore officials have never lost a case filed locally against international journalists or opposition politicians since 1983, when then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew allegedly demoted a sitting judge to a backwater position 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 had 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 Wong’s administration would cut the courts some unofficial slack in their decisions involving critics of the ruling People’s Action Party political establishment. It was not to be.

Condemnation against this ruling has been swift in coming. “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 has also condemned the ruling as a “textbook SLAPP suit against Bloomberg and journalist Low De Wei and demanded that authorities “end their legal harassment of trustworthy journalists.”

SLAPPs (strategic lawsuits against public participation) are lawsuits intended to censor, intimidate or silence critics by saddling them with expensive damages and legal costs. “Nothing has changed in 30 years since The New York Times published an opinion piece skewering the compliant court system in Singapore being used by its political leaders to silence or intimidate their domestic opponents and to discourage critical commentary about Singapore in foreign publications that are distributed or have business interests in Singapore”, stated an anonymous political observer of Singaporean politics to Asia Sentinel.

A significant aspect of Bloomberg and Low’s defense was centered around their invocation of the Reynolds privilege — a defense 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). Furthermore, Justice Lim also explicitly stated that constitutional free speech in Singapore is limited to Singaporean Citizens only, with no extension of such individual liberty afforded to foreign media entities employing them for covering Singapore-related news.

Not only has the timing of the defamation lawsuit been questionable, it had managed to evolve into fundamentally questioning whether the Bloomberg article should have been written at all. 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 individual roles in the growing collective trend of secretive high-value private property transactions in Singapore.

Tan in 2023 purchased a S$27.3 million (US$21.3 million) Good Class Bungalow (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, 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 embarassingly 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 Shanmugam’s argument in 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, Justice Lim said the article, when read as a whole, linked the ministers’ personal private property transactions with claims about secrecy, opacity and money laundering. Therefore, the Bloomberg article could not be seen as “responsible journalism”, but managed to create a defamatory impression.

After the story ran, the Singapore government ran into an unexpected problem. Officials first invoked Singapore’s notorious Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA), giving individual ministers the power to 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 was only after Bloomberg lost their defamation defense in court in July 2026 that they finally retracted the article as demanded by the Singapore government.

In other cases, when press organizations ignored the order, the government ordered their publications and websites banned in Singapore. Bloomberg’s initial challenge effectively dared the government to block its electronic transmissions into the island republic, which would have resulted in significant disruption for its 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 enter, would have simply come to a stop.

Faced with this impasse, both ministers instead 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.”