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’s 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 each minister, comprising S$170,000 in general damages and S$60,000 in aggravated damages, the judgment said.
Bloomberg’s 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.
“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 told Reuters in an email. He did not say whether Bloomberg planned an appeal.
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 “good class bungalows” – a prized kind of property in Singapore – that mentioned deals involving the ministers.
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