\n<\/p>\n
Bloomberg News and one of its reporters have been ordered to pay S$460,000 (US$355,734) in damages after an article it published was found to have defamed two Singapore government ministers, the city-state\u2019s high court said in a judgment released on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Bloomberg and the reporter, Low De Wei, are liable to jointly pay S$230,000 to each minister, comprising S$170,000 in general damages and S$60,000 in aggravated damages, \u2060the judgment said.<\/p>\n
Bloomberg\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe argued at trial that our reporting was accurate and served \u2060an important public interest, and we continue to believe that the ministers have imposed an extremely strained meaning on what was a solid \u200bstory,\u201d he told Reuters in an email. He \u200cdid not say whether Bloomberg planned an \u200cappeal.<\/p>\n
The home affairs minister, K Shanmugam, and the manpower minister, Tan See Leng, sued Bloomberg and one of its reporters for defamation over a December 2024 article about secrecy surrounding expensive property transactions involving \u201cgood class bungalows\u201d \u2013 a prized kind of property in Singapore \u2013 that mentioned deals involving the ministers.<\/p>\n
The law firm that represented the ministers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
In her judgment, Justice Audrey Lim \u200cwrote: \u201cThe 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 \u2018off-radar\u2019 was the cover devised to carry that story.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bloomberg defended the story as reporting on trends in luxury property transactions, saying both ministers were newsworthy examples of such deals. The news organisation told the court the article did not allege wrongdoing \u200bby the ministers.<\/p>\n
The lawyer for the ministers had called for aggravated damages to be awarded and said the defendants had shown malice.<\/p>\n
He said in court that when Bloomberg received a correction direction issued under Singapore\u2019s Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act, the company responded by lifting the paywall on the article and publicly stood by it.<\/p>\n
A Bloomberg editor said in an affidavit that the company had lifted \u2060the paywall so that readers could see the correction notice. The hearing was told that the \u200bnotice was placed at the top of \u200bthe story on its website, along with \u200ba statement that Bloomberg \u201crespectfully disagrees\u201d with the direction and stood by its reporting.<\/p>\n
In her ruling, the judge said \u200bLow had been reckless \u200cand false in describing the \u200bopacity of local government records \u200bfor non-caveated bungalow transactions.<\/p>\n
She said that such records were maintained in public records and made searchable through the Singapore Land Authority\u2019s integrated land information service, a fact Low knew from making searches as a reporter.<\/p>\n
\u201cI find that Bloomberg\u2019s conduct in removing the paywall pertaining to the article also demonstrates malice,\u201d the judge said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bloomberg News and one of its reporters have been ordered to pay S$460,000 (US$355,734) in damages after an article it published was found to have defamed two Singapore government ministers, the city-state\u2019s high court said in a judgment released on Tuesday. Bloomberg and the reporter, Low De Wei, are liable to jointly pay S$230,000 to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":51150,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[12815,1844,160,4718,321,957,1040,1201],"class_list":{"0":"post-51149","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-bloomberg","9":"tag-case","10":"tag-court","11":"tag-defamation","12":"tag-ministers","13":"tag-orders","14":"tag-pay","15":"tag-singapore"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51149"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51149\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/51150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}