Close Menu
Market Data Newsletter
Monday, September 28
Global Free Speech

CPJ warns Bloomberg defamation ruling could chill reporting in Singapore

News RoomBy No Comments2 Mins Read16 Views
CPJ warns Bloomberg defamation ruling could chill reporting in Singapore

Listen to the article

0:00
0:00

Jakarta, July 15, 2026—The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply concerned by the Singapore High Court’s decision ordering Bloomberg and one of its reporters to pay S$460,000 (US$356,000) in damages to two senior ministers who sued them for defamation over an article about their property deals.

The coordinating minister for national security, K. Shanmugam, and the manpower minister, Tan See Leng, filed lawsuits on January 6, 2025, against Bloomberg and its reporter, Low De Wei, over a December 12, 2024, article titled “Singapore Mansion Deals Are Increasingly Shrouded in Secrecy.”

The article focused on secrecy surrounding the purchases of “good class bungalows” — a luxury kind of property in Singapore — and mentioned 2023 deals involving the ministers.

“We are alarmed by Tuesday’s court decision, which will chill public interest reporting,” said CPJ’s Asia-Pacific Director Beh Lih Yi. “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.”

In her judgement, High Court Judge Audrey Lim said the Bloomberg article was defamatory and written with malice. “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,” Lim said. She awarded each claimant S$230,000. 

John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg, said in a statement the company stood by the newsroom and its reporter. “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 said.

On December 23, 2024, Bloomberg and three other news outlets were ordered to make corrections under Singapore’s Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act, which allows authorities to respond to online statements it determines are false.

According to the government’s fact-checking website, Factually, Bloomberg’s “false statements” attacked the “transparency of property transactions in Singapore.” 

K. Shanmugam and Tan See Leng did not immediately reply to CPJ’s emailed request for comment.

Read the full article here

Fact Checker

Verify the accuracy of this article using AI-powered analysis and real-time sources.

Share.

The FSNN News Room is the voice of our in-house journalists, editors, and researchers. We deliver timely, unbiased reporting at the crossroads of finance, cryptocurrency, and global politics, providing clear, fact-driven analysis free from agendas.

Related Articles

Global Free Speech

The BBC clearly sees the value of television series That Mitchell and Webb Look. Marking the 20th anniversary of its original screening, the Beeb has re-released the series on iPlayer. But – and there is very often a “but” with these things – they’ve removed around 11 sketches from the BAFTA award-winning show. The official word is that these sketches don’t “work today”, which is polite speak for “they may cause offence”. The episodes singled out include scenes featuring a battle reenactment with characters in blackface, a contestant on a show wearing a burka and a lost tribe” in a garden centre. These sketches set out to challenge stereotypes, not to reinforce them; but 20 years on, this distinction seems to have been lost along the way. I’m a bit uncomfortable about this. I find it infantilising, to say the least. Can’t we trust audiences to make up their own minds, to switch off if they find the sketches in question unpalatable? Does the BBC think that we are just passive consumers, unable to disaggregate the mocking of racism from racism itself? These sketches set out to challenge stereotypes, not to reinforce them This act of censorship is distorting – of the shows, whose narratives and rhythms were built to include these sketches, and more broadly too. Conversations we were having 20 years ago have been erased, as if to suggest that they never happened. But they did! And with this erasure, the opportunity for thoughtful engagement and learning from our past is gone. “Let’s just pretend we were all lovely 20 years ago. It’s better that way” seems to be the message. Speaking as a minority myself, I find that knowing the nasty stuff that people said before – and indeed, still say today – is much more useful than pretending it never happened. This approach, I think, is also inconsistent. What it reveals is a cherry-picking (intended or not) of the groups that we can mock, and those that we can’t. Let’s face it, gender stereotypes are rarely deemed to have aged beyond the pale – if that were the case, we would have to wave goodbye to half the television made before the mid-2010s. Suppression like this sends a bad message to artists, namely that what they’re creating today may hold less value tomorrow. Or, even worse, that future audiences may deem them bigots – that Sword of Damocles hovering over the heads of any creative paying attention to the discourse of the moment. Suppression like this sends a bad message to artists The BBC’s decision reaffirms a broader trend. In 2020, Little Britain was removed from the iPlayer platform for similar reasons. It has since been reinstated – minus some sketches. Meanwhile, the UK’s arts space more broadly is seeing a retreat to the land of “safe”, as Index recently revealed in a year-long investigation into self-censorship in UK theatre. The BBC, it must be said, does remarkable stuff. The ongoing podcast investigation into the disappearance of US journalist Austin Tice is just one example. But this does not mean, however, that they don’t sometimes get it wrong. Chopping at That Mitchell and Webb Look is one example. Sure, the removal of the material isn’t the life-or-death story that Index often works on. Sure, Mitchell and Webb aren’t the faces of persecuted artists – they have huge platforms and agreed to the changes themselves. Still, one can’t help but think that the decision came from a place of conservatism, perhaps even fear. This is weak and dispiriting, indeed the very opposite of what enables creativity in the arts. We shouldn’t be encouraging this cultural timidity. Rather, we should harness culture and creativity as the starting points of a conversation about our here and now. That’s what the arts are for, after all. READ MORE

Add A Comment

Comments are closed.