SINGAPORE: The High Court on May 11 ordered The Online Citizen (TOC) chief editor Terry Xu to pay more than S$154,000 in legal costs to Cabinet ministers K. Shanmugam and Tan See Leng over the defamation suit they had brought against him.
The sum comprises $78,000 in lawyers’ fees - $39,000 for each minister - and more than $76,000 in disbursements, which are out-of-pocket expenses.
Shanmugam, the Coordinating Minister for National Security, was awarded $$44,398.25 in disbursements, while Manpower Minister Dr Tan was awarded $32,064.25.
Xu was not present or represented by a lawyer at the hearing to determine legal costs.
In March, Shanmugam, who is also Home Affairs Minister, and Dr Tan were each awarded $210,000 in damages over an article that TOC had published in December 2024, titled “Bloomberg: Nearly half of 2024 GCB transactions lack public record, raising transparency concerns”.
The TOC article referred to a Dec 12, 2024, Bloomberg article on good class bungalow (GCB) transactions which mentioned the property deals made by the two ministers in 2023.
The Bloomberg article, headlined “Singapore mansion deals are increasingly shrouded in secrecy”, is the subject of a separate defamation suit Mr Shanmugam and Dr Tan brought against the financial news provider and its journalist Low De Wei.
These lawsuits were filed on Jan 6, 2025.
The ministers were granted permission by the court on Jan 28 that year to serve the legal papers on Xu in Taiwan.
He did not file a response in his defence.
On Aug 26, 2025, Justice Lim granted default judgment in favour of Shanmugam and Dr Tan.
Xu was also absent from the subsequent hearing to assess the quantum of damages, held on Feb 26.
In a letter sent to the court that day, he stated categorically that he was not submitting to the jurisdiction of the Singapore courts for the assessment of damages or any other substantive stage of the proceedings.
In her written judgment issued on March 31, Justice Audrey Lim said Xu’s failure to file a defence meant that the facts in the ministers’ statements of claim are taken to be admitted by him.
She set out the factors that pointed towards the award of higher damages.
Justice Lim said the TOC article’s allegations attacked the ministers’ character by portraying them as individuals who are part of an opaque system and who circumvented transparency requirements to avoid scrutiny of their conduct, and therefore suggesting that they had done something improper.
“As Cabinet ministers, these allegations disparage not only the claimants’ personal (reputation) but professional reputation as well,” she added.
Justice Lim said Xu’s defamatory allegations were very grave as they directly impugned the claimants’ personal integrity, character and professional reputation.
The extent of publication and republication of the article was substantial, she noted. Besides being accessible on TOC’s website, the article was also published on TOC’s social media platforms.
Xu also amplified the defamatory content by publishing four additional articles between Dec 23, 2024, and Jan 3, 2025, that referred to or contained links to the original article. Each of these subsequent articles was also promoted on TOC’s social media accounts.
The judge also found that Xu had acted in malice. Xu was put on notice to the falsehoods in the article by Dr Tan and Shanmugam’s lawyers on Dec 19, 2024, and in an article on the Government’s fact-checking website Factually on Dec 23, 2024.
He responded by saying that the article was “based on factual and verifiable public records”, and maintained that its contents were true and entirely justified, the judge noted.
Xu also breached an Aug 26, 2025, injunction order that restrained him from disseminating the defamatory allegations.
In their lawsuits, Shanmugam and Dr Tan had each sought damages in excess of the awards made in two other defamation cases.
These are a 2021 case when then Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong was awarded $210,000 against Xu for a TOC article over 38 Oxley Road; and a 2024 case where Shanmugam was awarded $200,000 against Lee Hsien Yang for defaming him over his rental of a state property in Ridout Road.
Justice Lim said the nature of the defamation in the present case was, in her view, graver than the case involving Senior Minister Lee.
In that case, Xu’s allegations impugned SM Lee’s reputation and character by alleging that he was dishonest, but the allegations related primarily to a family feud and not, say, to misconduct in his capacity as a public officer pertaining to public funds or to serious criminal conduct, she added.
The extent of publication and republication in the present case was highly substantial, said the judge – much larger than the case involving Shanmugam and Lee Hsien Yang, and comparable to the case involving SM Lee. - The Straits Times/ANN
