Representative imageSingapore’s high court ordered the Bloomberg news agency on Tuesday to pay Sg$230,000 (US$178,000) in damages each to two senior ministers in a defamation case linked to a report on luxury property transactions.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 Jan 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.“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,” Justice Audrey Lim said in a written judgment. “These are grave assertions that directly impugn the claimants’ personal integrity, character and professional reputation,” she said.Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait said the agency was disappointed by the ruling “but we will of course respect it”. “Our newsroom — and our reporter — conducted themselves with integrity, and met all our editorial standards in preparing the story at the centre of this trial. We continue to stand by them,” he said.Report by AFP