SINGAPORE – Coordinating Minister for National Security K. Shanmugam said a Bloomberg article that mentioned the sale of his property suggested that he was involved in shady deals and possibly money laundering.
Mr Shanmugam said the article implied that his transaction was a secret deal that became “political fodder”, and that he took more money than what the property was worth from people who cannot be identified.
The minister was taking the stand for the third day in an ongoing defamation trial over the article on good class bungalow (GCB) transactions, headlined “Singapore mansion deals are increasingly shrouded in secrecy”.
Mr Shanmugam, who is also Home Affairs Minister, and Manpower Minister Tan See Leng have sued Bloomberg and Mr Low De Wei, the reporter who wrote the Dec 12, 2024, piece.
The article mentioned the ministers’ property deals in 2023 – the sale of Mr Shanmugam’s former home in the Queen Astrid Park area to UBS Trustees for $88 million in August 2023 and Dr Tan’s purchase of a bungalow in Brizay Park for nearly $27.3 million.
Over the past three days, Mr Shanmugam has stressed that the article was written to “target” him by using a broader story about bungalow transactions to put out news about the sale of his property.
He cited internal e-mails exchanged among Bloomberg journalists to show that they were trying to find a “hook” to get into the story.
On April 9, Mr Shanmugam was cross-examined briefly by Mr Low’s lawyer, Senior Counsel Chelva Rajah.
The minister said he “wholly disagreed” with Mr Rajah’s suggestion that the article did not allege any criminal, illegal or improper conduct on his part.
Questioned later by his own lawyer, Senior Counsel Davinder Singh, Mr Shanmugam said the “entire article is false”.
The article opens with the assertion that the ultra-rich in Singapore are “cloaking” their property purchases in secrecy.
It states that deals made without the filing of caveats are “harder to track” because they do not show up in a database maintained by the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA).
A caveat is a legal document that property buyers can submit to the Singapore Land Authority (SLA) to register their interest in a property and prevent other people from buying it.
