Singapore Court Orders Bloomberg to Pay S$460,000 in Damages to Two Ministers

Singapore's High Court ordered Bloomberg LP and reporter Low De Wei to pay S$460,000 in damages to ministers K Shanmugam and Tan See Leng on 14 July 2026. Bloomberg and the reporter must each pay S$230,000 to the two ministers combined. Each minister will receive S$170,000 in general damages and S$60,000 in aggravated damages.

The Bloomberg article reported that K Shanmugam sold a bungalow for S$88 million to an unnamed buyer using a trust and that Tan See Leng bought a Good Class Bungalow for around S$27 million through a non-caveated deal. High Court judge Audrey Lim ruled that the article's natural and ordinary meaning was that the ministers took advantage of regulations to deal properties in a non-transparent manner to avoid scrutiny that might extend to money laundering.

Bloomberg took the article down from its website after the verdict. Singaporean authorities ordered Bloomberg to publish a correction notice on the article under the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act. Bloomberg published the notice but added a statement that it was required to do so under threat of sanction while standing by its reporting.

Bloomberg's editor-in-chief John Micklethwait stated that the ministers who sued imposed an extremely strained meaning on what was a solid story.

POFMA correction notices were also issued to other news outlets that reshared the Bloomberg story or published commentaries on it. K Shanmugam and Tan See Leng successfully filed a defamation suit against the editor-in-chief of The Online Citizen over a commentary on the Bloomberg piece.

In 2009 the Far Eastern Economic Review was ordered to pay more than S$400,000 after a court ruled one of its articles defamed then prime minister Lee Hsien Loong and Lee Kuan Yew.

The Economist and the New York Times have been ordered to pay damages in defamation suits in Singapore.