Lawsuits in Singapore: Familiar Story
Ministers threaten Bloomberg with libel action
The threat of a defamation suit against Bloomberg News by Singapore ministers K Shanmugam and Tan See Leng for what they allege are libelous statements on property transactions in a December 12 article is a reprise in variations on an old Singapore story going back decades, in which actions have been filed against political opponents and journalists in Singapore courts, and damages collected, without a single loss.
Lawsuits in fact are a familiar tactic by the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP), regarded by the founding prime minister, the late Lee Kuan Yew, as essential to the protection of the government’s integrity, and have been used to hold the press and opposition in check. They have done so, earning the island republic a standing of 126th in 180 nations, behind Lesotho and Kyrgyzstan in Reporters Without Borders’ 2023 freedom of the press rankings.
In the current case Shanmugam, the Law and Home Affairs minister, and Manpower Minister Tan See Leng, said on Facebook that “We have taken legal advice and will be issuing letters of demand in relation to that article. We will be taking similar action against others who have also published libelous statements about those transactions.”
The Facebook post didn’t point out what the transgressions were. Requests for comment from Bloomberg and the law ministry went unanswered.
The Bloomberg article, titled “Singapore mansion deals are increasingly shrouded in secrecy,” referred to luxury houses or so-called good-class bungalows, and mentioned transactions involving the two ministers although the references to the two appear to be factual, pointing out that “Last year, Singapore’s Minister for Manpower Tan See Leng bought a Good Class Bungalow in another enclave called Brizay Park for nearly S$27.3 million,” and that “In September, an online media outlet reported that UBS Trustees had bought a bungalow from Singapore’s law minister, K Shanmugam, in the Queen Astrid Park area for S$88 million. The transaction was inked more than a year ago in August 2023.”
“I don’t see anything defamatory in the Bloomberg article,” said Kenneth Jeyaratnam, the secretary-general of the opposition Reform Party. “How is this article libelous? If untrue why has no [demand for correction under the country’s ‘fake news law’] been served? If someone named feels the article defames them, surely they would need to prove both falsity and damage to their reputation?” Property sale documents pertaining to Shanmugam’s bungalow have been posted online, forestalling any accusations of fabrication from the law minister. Indeed, this has been why till the latest Bloomberg article’s publication, Shanmugam has been uncharacteristically quiet about it.
However, although the Bloomberg article apparently stated only facts on the ministers’ transactions, their lawyers could argue the article overall suggested the ministers were secretive and non-transparent. Indeed, the Bloomberg story said Singapore’s ultra-rich “are increasingly cloaking their purchases of mansions in the city-state in secrecy, to avoid drawing attention to their wealth.”
In this case, months before Bloomberg’s article. Asia Sentinel reported without drawing legal action on September 13 that Shanmugam had “sold off his ultra-exclusive ‘Good Class Bungalow’ at 6 Astrid Hill more than a year ago for a whopping S$88 million (US$67.5 million) to an anonymous buyer under a trust managed by UBS Trustees (Singapore) Ltd for a profit 10 times the original value and ranking as one of the most expensive in Singapore’s property market history. He paid S$7.95 million (US$6.1 million) for the property in 2003. Tatler Asia last year, reported only three such properties have sold in Singapore for more than S$88 million (35 Ridout Road, Garlick Avenue, and 30 Nassim Hill) in the past decade.”
Using the island’s courts, Lee Kuan Yew and his son, former Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, have sued a wide array of international publications for a wide variety of reasons including nepotism and other issues. Besides the New York Times and the now-defunct International Herald Tribune, they include the Wall Street Journal, the Asian Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, the Economist, Asiaweek, and the Far Eastern Economic Review, the latter two out of business. Three times in the previous decade, Lee and his son, current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, sued for defamation over insinuations they were building a dynasty in Singapore.
Former Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong also took after the now-defunct International Herald Tribune and columnist Philip Bowring (disclaimer: Asia Sentinel co-founder and contributing editor) for an article which said: “Dynastic politics is evident in ‘Communist’ China already, as in Singapore” and won S$950,000 in damages. In 2007, as Asia Sentinel reported, the London-based Financial Times was forced into an apology and monetary settlement for a story in which there appeared to be no libel.
Shanmugam in particular may feel sensitive because in May 2023, it became known that he and Foreign Affairs Minister Vivian Balakrishnan were renting magnificent colonial-era bungalows on exclusive Ridout Road which are owned by the government and whose grounds were renovated at state expense. The Singapore Land Authority, which rents out the properties, comes under the Law Ministry headed by Shanmugam although he maintained that he had rented the property through an agent in a hands-off transaction. In a July 2023 six-hour parliamentary session, both the government and the opposition, possibly gun-shy over previous lawsuit threats, ran rings around each other to point out that nobody had done anything wrong. Nonetheless, the imbroglio earned the two the sobriquet “the Rajahs of Ridout Road.”
The matter was sensitive a city-state so crowded that everybody except the massively rich lives in a high-rise flat and where even the relatively modest government-supplied flats, called Housing Development Board (HDB) flats, are getting expensive for many Singaporeans. According to reports, the property rented by Balakrishnan covers 136,101 sq ft – about the size of two standard-sized football fields. Shanmugam’s bungalow includes land from an adjacent property and totals 249,335 sq ft. There are only about 500 such houses, known as “black-and-whites” for their characteristic combination of dark timber beams and whitewashed walls, in a city of 5.4 million people that is so crowded that the government has hauled in 130 sq km of sand from neighboring Malaysia, Indonesia, and Cambodia to bring its size to 744 sq km. The Lion City remains the world’s 20th smallest country, ranking between Micronesia and Tonga.