Bloomberg News and one of its reporters were ordered to pay S$460,000 ($355,734) in damages after an article it published was found to have defamed two Singapore government ministers, the city-state’s High Court said in a judgement released yesterday.
Bloomberg and the reporter Low De Wei are liable to pay S$230,000 to each minister, comprising S$170,000 in general damages and S$60,000 in aggravated damages, said the judgement.
Bloomberg 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.
“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,” he told Reuters in an email.
He did not say whether Bloomberg planned an appeal.
The law firm that represented the ministers did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In her judgment, Justice Audrey Lim wrote: “The dominant purpose behind the article was to publish a story about the claimants, in particular about their (good class bungalow) transactions. The broader narrative of how wealthy individuals in Singapore use non-caveated transactions and trust structures to keep their dealings secret or ‘off-radar’ was the cover devised to carry that story.”
Home Minister K Shanmugam and Manpower Minister Tan See Leng had sued Bloomberg and one of its reporters for defamation over a December 2024 article on secrecy around expensive property transactions that mentioned deals involving the two ministers.
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