SINGAPORE: Singa­pore’s High Court ordered the Bloomberg news agency on Tuesday to pay $178,000 in damages each to two senior government ministers in a defamation case linked to a report on luxury property deals.

Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam and Manpower Minister Tan See Leng filed the suits against the US-based global news organisation and its reporter Low De Wei in January 2025, alleging the article had harmed their reputations.

The story, headlined “Singapore Mansion Deals Are Increasingly Shrouded in Secrecy”, looked at top-range houses called Good Class Bungalows and claimed many purchases did not have legal filings, making the deals harder to track.

The story referred to transactions involving the two cabinet ministers. Justice Audrey Lim ruled in a written judgment released on Tuesday that the article had defamed the ministers.

“I have found that the natural and ordinary mea­ning of the Article is that the claimants took advantage of the absence of checks and balances or disclosure requirements to conduct their property transa­ctions in a non-transparent manner, and that they did so to hide their transactions and avoid scrutiny that might extend to the possibility of money laundering,” Lim said.

Published in Dawn, July 15th, 2026