A Singapore court has ordered Bloomberg News and one of its reporters to pay a total of S$460,000 (US$355,734) in damages to two government ministers after an article published by the news organization was found to have defamed them. The ministers, K Shanmugam, the home affairs minister, and Tan See Leng, the manpower minister, sued Bloomberg and its reporter, Low De Wei, over a December 2024 article about secrecy surrounding expensive property transactions involving ‘good class bungalows’ in Singapore.
The article mentioned deals involving the ministers, and they claimed that it defamed them. The court found that the article’s dominant purpose was to publish a story about the ministers’ property transactions, and that the broader narrative about wealthy individuals in Singapore using non-caveated transactions and trust structures to keep their dealings secret was a cover for that story.
Bloomberg defended the story as reporting on trends in luxury property transactions, saying that both ministers were newsworthy examples of such deals. The news organization told the court that the article did not allege wrongdoing by the ministers. However, the judge found that Low had been reckless and false in describing the opacity of local government records for non-caveated bungalow transactions, and that such records were maintained in public records and made searchable through the Singapore Land Authority’s integrated land information service.
The judge also found that Bloomberg’s conduct in removing the paywall pertaining to the article demonstrated malice. Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief, John Micklethwait, said he was disappointed by the ruling and that the company continued to stand by its reporter and the newsroom. He argued that the reporting was accurate and served an important public interest, and that the ministers had imposed an extremely strained meaning on what was a solid story.
The law firm that represented the ministers did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The judgment did not specify whether Bloomberg planned to appeal the ruling.
