Few topics in Singapore are as fraught as the soaring prices of the city-state’s coveted, multimillion-dollar bungalows and the identities of those buying and selling them.
In December 2024, Bloomberg News published an article reporting that Singapore’s ultrarich were acquiring these trophy properties through opaque trusts without filing the disclosures that would have made the purchases public. The article identified two government ministers: one who had sold his bungalow and another who had bought one in transactions each worth tens of millions of U.S. dollars.
Within days, the government invoked Singapore’s so-called fake news law, ordering Bloomberg to place a “correction notice” atop the article declaring that it contained falsehoods and directing readers to the government’s official fact-checking website. The two ministers then sued Bloomberg and its reporter, Low De Wei, for defamation.
On Tuesday, a judge ruled that Bloomberg and Mr. Low defamed the two ministers — Tan See Leng, the minister of manpower, and Kasiviswanathan Shanmugam, the coordinating minister for national security and the minister for home affairs — and ordered the news agency and the journalist to jointly pay 230,000 Singaporean dollars ($177,000) to each minister.
The case was closely watched by many because Bloomberg was the first foreign news organization in nearly four decades to go to trial to contest a defamation lawsuit brought by Singaporean officials. Several legal experts have described it as the most significant libel case in recent memory.
“We are very disappointed by this ruling but we will of course respect it,” John Micklethwait, Bloomberg’s editor in chief, said in a Bloomberg article. “We argued 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,” Mr. Micklethwait added. Bloomberg declined to make Mr. Low available for interview.
Representatives for Mr. Shanmugam and Mr. Tan did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
During the trial, which began in April, neither minister disputed the accuracy of the reporting on their property transactions but their lawyer argued that the use of words like “shrouded,” “secrecy” and “cloaking” to describe Singapore’s luxury real estate market hinted at impropriety. On the stand, Mr. Shanmugam said the article suggested that he was involved “in a shady deal with the possibilities of money laundering.”
The High Court judge, Audrey Lim, said that the article made “grave assertions that directly impugn the claimants’ personal integrity, character and professional reputation.” She also granted an injunction requested by the ministers to remove the article.
Singapore ranks among the world’s most unfavorable legal environments for journalists, according to Reporters Without Borders. In 2002, Bloomberg paid the equivalent of about $460,000 in damages to Singaporean leaders over an opinion article. The New York Times Company apologized and paid settlements after Singaporean officials brought libel claims over opinion articles in the mid-1990s and in 2010.
Until this latest case, it had been years since an official in Singapore sued a foreign news outlet. In recent years, the affluent city-state has become a regional hub for many international news organizations.
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