Singapore’s High Court ruled on Tuesday that the Bloomberg news agency must pay $178,000 in damages to each of two senior government cabinet ministers following a defamation lawsuit concerning a report on luxury real estate transactions.
The legal action was initiated in January 2025 by Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam and Manpower Minister Tan See Leng against the US-based global news outlet and its journalist, Low De Wei, over allegations that the published article damaged their professional standing.
The disputed story, carrying the headline “Singapore Mansion Deals Are Increasingly Shrouded in Secrecy”, analyzed transactions involving high-end residential properties known as Good Class Bungalows. The piece asserted that numerous property acquisitions lacked official legal filings, rendering the transactions significantly more difficult to monitor.
The article specifically highlighted transactions associated with both cabinet members. In a written judgment issued on Tuesday, Justice Audrey Lim determined that the published reporting defamed the two ministers.
“I have found that the natural and ordinary meaning of the Article is that the claimants took advantage of the absence of checks and balances or disclosure requirements to conduct their property transactions in a non-transparent manner, and that they did so to hide their transactions and avoid scrutiny that might extend to the possibility of money laundering,” Lim wrote in her ruling.
