Bloomberg Loses Landmark Libel Case in Singapore
John Fraher, left, a senior executive editor for Bloomberg, and Low De Wei, a Bloomberg journalist, leaving court in Singapore in April | Edgar Su/Reuters
In an article for The New York Times, Sui-Lee Wee covers the trial between Bloomberg and two Singaporean government minsters. She asserts that the judge ruling in favor of the ministers in a closely watched defamation trial seen as a significant test of the country’s libel laws and their implications for press freedom.
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.
