Bloomberg Says No to Singapore Correction Demand

The collision between Singaporean politics and the country’s ambition to be the financial center of Asia occurred earlier this week when the law ministry invoked its fake news law against Bloomberg, the world’s premier financial data and business news reporting service, for allegedly publishing false information regarding the transparency of multi-million dollar property transactions involving two of its ministers.

Almost unheard of for a major news organization, the New York-based Bloomberg refused to back down, saying on December 20, “Under Singapore’s Prevention of Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act, Bloomberg is required under threat of sanction to publish this Correction Direction. Bloomberg respectfully disagrees with it, and reserves its right to appeal and challenge the Correction Direction. We stand by our reporting.” The article can be found here.

That dares the government to block Bloomberg’s electronic transmissions into the island republic, or take other action. There is no indication yet what punishment, if any, the government might mete out to the company, but the threat is real and could send frissons through the business community. Singapore has never backed down from a fight with news organizations, suing some of the biggest for defamation or contempt of court without a single loss in its own courts. In 1988, it first cut the circulation of the Wall Street Journal’s Asian edition from 5,000 copies per day to 400, then refused its correspondent an extension of his visa. The office didn’t reopen for five years although AP-Dow Jones Telerate, its ill-fated Bloomberg-like business data transmission service, continued to operate. Undeterred, The Journal, arguably the US’s most respected daily newspaper, shifted its Asia headquarters from Hong Kong to Singapore in May.

Bloomberg’s Singapore office, which opened in 1990, is huge, employing scores of people as part of a global network of over 159 locations and more than 21,000 employees. Moreover, hundreds of its terminals, the essential tool for professional traders and investors, are in virtually every financial office in Singapore, providing crucial real-time data and articles on almost every financial transaction that takes place anywhere on the globe. Without that information, Singapore’s financial industry, which competes with Hong Kong as Asia’s premier financial enter, would simply come to a stop.

Singapore ministers K. Shanmugam, the Law and Home Affairs minister, and Manpower Minister Tan See Leng, first said on Facebook that “We have taken legal advice and will be issuing letters of demand in relation to that article” for what they alleged were libelous statements on property transactions in Bloomberg’s December 12 article. titled “Singapore mansion deals are increasingly shrouded in secrecy,” and referred to luxury houses or so-called good-class bungalows, and mentioned transactions involving the two ministers. Asia Sentinel covered the story earlier without earning government action.

The references to the two appear to be factual, the Bloomberg article pointing out that “Last year, Singapore’s Minister for Manpower Tan See Leng bought a Good Class Bungalow (GCB) 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.”

In a Facebook post on December 26, a Singapore opposition party, the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) called on the Singapore government “to make public – immediately – the identity of the buyer of Minister Shanmugam’s former property, 6 Astrid Hill. If it fails, or refuses to do so, it must tell Singaporeans why.”

In a Facebook post on the same day, Lim Tean, the leader of another Singapore opposition party the People’s Voice, expressed support for the SDP’s call. Lim said, “Shanmugam is a political figure. How can it be that Singaporeans do not know the real identity of the purchaser of his house?”

There is no indication that a lawsuit has yet been filed. The business publication The Edge Singapore as well as The Independent Singapore and The Online Citizen, now based in Taiwan, each carried the Bloomberg piece. The former two have carried correction notices despite Bloomberg’s refusal to knuckle under. The Online Citizen editor Terry Xu refused, saying “The ministers have not disputed the accuracy of the facts reported in the article, including their property transactions. Instead, their claims rely on their own subjective interpretations, alleging that the article implies they exploited legal mechanisms for privacy in a non-transparent manner. These implications are not present in the article and were explicitly denied within it.”

Xu has become a target of sorts of government wrath. He went into exile in Taiwan after being pursued by the Infocomm Media Development Authority, which suspended his broadcasting class license over a dispute over reports on funding sources. Xu’s appeal was dismissed last December. “There was no way to continue working given we already lost the high court decisions,” he said. Thus the move to Taiwan. It was The Online Citizen’s September 12 article on Shanmugam’s previously secret GCB sale for a windfall of S$88 million (US$67.5 million), that generated Bloomberg’s story.

Under Singapore’s fake news law, noncompliance can earn fines and/or prison terms. More importantly, refusal to comply by posting a notice and correction at the top of the offending article can earn an “Access Block Order” from the Infocomm Media Development Authority to order internet service providers to disable access in Singapore.

The law, in existence for five years, had been used 152 times by September, according to the pro-government broadsheet The Straits Times, often against political opponents. About a third were against news organizations, with almost unanimous compliance. Asia Sentinel was until now the only victim, in June of 2023 when it refused the order, saying its story was accurate and there was no need for a correction although as ordered it carried the government’s correction demand at the top of the story.

Repeated requests for comment from the Bloomberg Asia-Pacific communications team in Sydney have been met with silence beyond an email saying “Thanks for your query below, but as you may have seen in other reporting, we are not making comment on this matter,” then a second calling attention to the government demand for a correction newly placed at the top of the story. There has been no indication by the Infocomm authority on what, if any, punishment might be meted out to Bloomberg if it continues to refuse to comply.

Shanmugam has rapidly become a lightning rod in Singapore who has been overshadowing the new prime minister Lawrence Wong, who took over from Lee Hsien Loong, a son of Singapore’s first Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, in May. Shanmugam is a pugnacious attack dog who often leads the charge in Parliament against the luckless opposition Workers Party and its leaders and who among other things led a campaign against Lee Hsien Yang, the estranged brother of former Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who fled the country in 2022 alleging persecution, daring Shanmugam and Foreign Affairs Minister Vivian Balakrishnan to sue him in the UK, where he is now living with his wife Lee Suet Fern, concerning rentals of palatial state-owned bungalows on Singapore’s exclusive Ridout Road. The ministers were given unprecedented permission to serve Lee by Facebook messenger instead of in person. They were awarded S$200,000 each, which they said would be donated to charity, plus S$119,000 in costs against Hsien Yang.

Nonetheless, the affair won the two the sobriquet “the Rajahs of Ridout Road” and resulted in considerable embarrassment in 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 Housing Development Board (HDB) flats, are getting too expensive for many Singaporeans.