Financial news outlet Bloomberg harboured “unprecedented” malice in the publication and handling of an article about the purchase of good class bungalows in Singapore, lawyers for two Singaporean cabinet ministers alleged on Friday during closing statements in a defamation lawsuit.
Senior counsel Davinder Singh said the case was unprecedented in terms of ill intent and aggravation, seeking damages exceeding those against The Online Citizen chief editor Terry Xu, who was ordered to pay S$574,000 (US$448,469) to K. Shanmugam and Tan See Leng in another defamation case related to the article.
Last January, Shanmugam, the coordinating minister for national security, and Tan, the manpower minister, filed separate suits against Bloomberg and its reporter Low De Wei over a story titled “Singapore mansion deals are increasingly shrouded in secrecy”.
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The claimants said that parts of the article were false, baseless and calculated to disparage and impugn them.
On Friday, Singh said malice was “blatantly obvious”, noting that Bloomberg did not challenge the order to remove the article under Singapore’s fake news law, while publicly standing by its reporting and dropping the article’s paywall.
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The case was on “a completely separate scale”, said Singh, adding that damages “should exceed” those ordered against Xu, who defamed the two ministers in a related article citing Bloomberg’s reporting.