Singapore opposition politician ordered to pay PM Lee Hsien Loong US$99,000 in defamation case

Leong Sze Hian of the Peoples Voice party was sued after he shared on Facebook an article linking Lee to Malaysia’s 1MDB financial scandal

The judgment on a separate libel case brought by Lee against blogger Terry Xu is expected soon, after the trial ended in February

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Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong launched the defamation case in December 2018. Photo: DPA

Published: 4:42pm, 24 Mar 2021Updated: 4:57pm, 24 Mar 2021

A Singapore court has ordered an opposition politician to pay Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong S$133,000 (US$99,000) in damages for defamation in one of two recent libel suits launched by the island nation’s premier over online comments about him.

While the leaders of Singapore’s ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) – including Lee and his late father, former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew – have in the past launched libel suits or settled out of court with foreign news outlets, Leong Sze Hian is only the second online critic to face such action.

The prime minister launched the defamation case against Leong – a member of the opposition Peoples Voice party – in December 2018, after he had shared an article on Facebook a month earlier that suggested Lee was involved in Malaysia’s multibillion-dollar financial scandal at the 1MDB state fund.

Najib Razak, Malaysia’s prime minister from 2009 to 2018, is implicated in the case and has been sentenced to 12 years in jail in one of a series of trials linking him to the theft.

Leong posted the article, published by the Malaysian website The Coverage, without comment. He later took down the post but failed to comply with demands by Lee’s lawyers for a public apology and damages for disseminating its “false and baseless” contents.