Bloomberg reporter in defamation trial grilled over claim that property deals are ‘secret’
Selina Lum
The Straits Times
April 13, 2026
The Bloomberg reporter who has been sued by two ministers for defamation over an article he wrote about good class bungalow (GCB) transactions took the stand on April 13, the fifth day of an ongoing trial.
Mr Low De Wei, who is also known as Dexter, maintained that he had acted in good faith and was “motivated by the public interest in transparency and reporting on a trend in the Singapore GCB market”.
But the ministers’ lawyer, Senior Counsel Davinder Singh, grilled Mr Low on claiming that certain deals are kept “secret” from the public and accused him of conveying falsehoods.
Coordinating Minister for National Security K. Shanmugam and Manpower Minister Tan See Leng have sued Bloomberg and Mr Low over the Dec 12, 2024, article, headlined “Singapore mansion deals are increasingly shrouded in secrecy”.
The article mentioned the ministers’ property deals in 2023 – the sale of Mr Shanmugam’s former home in the Queen Astrid Park area to UBS Trustees for $88 million and Dr Tan’s non-caveated purchase of a bungalow in Brizay Park for nearly $27.3 million.
The article states that the ultra-rich in Singapore are increasingly cloaking their purchases of mansions in secrecy, such as by using trusts to keep their identities private.
It also states that deals without caveats are much harder to track because they do not show up in a database maintained by the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA).
A caveat is a legal document that property buyers and mortgage lenders can submit to the Singapore Land Authority (SLA) to register their interest in a property and prevent it from being sold to others.
Earlier in the trial, Mr Shanmugam, who is also Home Affairs Minister, had told the court that the non-filing of a caveat did not keep a deal secret because records have to be filed with government agencies.
On April 13, Mr Singh questioned Mr Low on the use of words in the article such as “secret”, “shrouded”, “cloaking” and “opacity”.
Pointing out that Mr Low graduated from the London School of Economics, the senior counsel said the reporter would have known that the word “secret” meant information or facts which are not known.
Mr Low agreed, but added that the article was referring to information being kept secret from the public, not from the Government.
Mr Singh challenged Mr Low’s contention that information about non-caveated deals is kept secret from the public.
The lawyer took him through the workings of the URA’s platform known as REALIS, and a separate portal run by the SLA known as INLIS.
Mr Singh said that even if a property transaction is not caveated, once the deal has been completed, one would be able to find out information on the transferor, the transferee and the purchase price from INLIS.
Mr Low said a search would take a number of steps, and that each search had to be carried out on a specific address, but agreed that any member of the public could do it.
Mr Singh said that since anyone could have found the information, there was no secrecy.
Mr Low replied that he did not think anyone in Singapore has “thousands of dollars” to make such searches.
Mr Singh responded: “I’m asking you whether there’s a secret; you’re talking about the cost of doing so. Do you agree that these are two different matters?”
When Mr Low said no, the lawyer pressed on: “You are saying because it entails a cost, the information is secret to the public?”
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