WTC Wrap: 11 April 2026

A bit of a long one this week! Also, I wrote this newsletter as usual yesterday and then totally forgot to actually schedule it to send. My jet lag is going away but clearly the exhaustion hasn’t fully receded yet 😅

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Hearings for the defamation suit brought by ministers K Shanmugam and Tan See Leng against Bloomberg and their reporter began this week. Low De Wei had written an article—'Singapore Mansion Deals Are Increasingly Shrouded in Secrecy'—in December 2024 about big-ticket Good Class Bungalow transactions, and how they increasingly don't include property caveats that would show up in a Urban Redevelopment Agency database, or are bought through shell companies or trusts to keep the buyer's identity private. The article mentions Tan's purchase of a GCB for almost $27.3 million, and Shanmugam's sale of a GCB for $88 million.

The ministers say that the article is defamatory because it suggests that they'd taken advantage of the lack of disclosure requirements to carry out transactions in a "non-transparent manner". Testifying in court, Shanmugam alleged that Bloomberg hadn't been truthful with his press secretary about the purpose of the article in question, and argued that Bloomberg's failure to retract their article after getting POFMA-ed was basis for aggravated damages. He put forward that the article had been written to "target" him, that it was a story about GCB transactions written so the news of his sale could be slipped in. He called the article "completely false" and said that it didn't accurately reflect Singapore's anti-money-laundering processes.

Bloomberg's lawyer, Sreenivasan Narayanan, pointed out that none of the "false statements" that Bloomberg has been accused by the government of making actually appeared verbatim in the article. Shanmugam's lawyer, Davinder Singh, conceded this point, but said that the article had "communicated" falsehoods.

The trial is ongoing as I write this, so I won't say much—we'll have to keep an eye on this as it develops!

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Also on trial this week: Jolovan Wham, for three counts under the Public Order Act for allegedly "marking" executions with candlelight vigils without permission. I wasn't able to attend the trial myself because Jolovan, who represented himself, called on me as a witness on Thursday afternoon, so I have to rely on the accounts from friends who did attend. Teo Soh Lung attended the whole trial and wrote about it on Facebook. This was Jolovan's defence statement, as published by Soh Lung:

Your Honour,

I do not dispute that I was outside Changi Prison. I also do not dispute that I posted on social media. It is true that the photographs establish location and my own social media posts include my thoughts on capital punishment and my resistance towards the death penalty.

What did my presence outside Changi Prison symbolise? It was an act of bereavement. It was also an act of personal conscience. It was a moral response. It was a refusal to be indifferent to death and the horrors of state violence.

However, the legal issue is not what my thoughts and feelings were, or what my presence symbolised, which I shared through my social media posts. Any views I later expressed online, even my reasons for being there, have to be seen as distinct from my conduct outside Changi Prison, because this is what the Public Order Act is regulating.

Evidence has to be drawn from the event itself, and what I was communicating to the public at the material time, rather than what I said after the event was over.

The prosecution has also not shown evidence of coordinated activity or collective conduct. Their response to this is that even a one-person assembly is illegal. But this flies in the face of the facts of the case: I was not there alone. I was with 3 others and we stayed together as a group throughout.

I also believe that this case does not engage with the purpose of the Act. I understand the prosecution has said the High Court has ruled otherwise. But deference to authority cannot be a substitute for common sense and logic. Your Honour, the preamble of the Public Order Act makes clear that its purpose is:“to provide powers necessary for preserving public order and the safety of individuals”. In this case, there was no disorder, no noise, no obstruction, and no threat to safety. The police officers themselves accepted this in their evidence.

This is important because it shows that the conduct in question does not fall within the concern of the Act. The Act must be applied in a manner that is reasonable and proportionate to its purpose. In the parliamentary debates before the bill became law, the government then said it was important, and I quote, to “take into account the need for greater political space”.

Our society is continually evolving. We now have a highly literate, largely well-educated population. “Civil society is growing; and there is now a more active citizenry. This evolution and the concomitant need for greater space for political expression must also be factored in.” Read together with this excerpt from Parliament, a broad interpretation that treats mere presence, quiet conduct, and personal acts of conscience as criminal would go beyond the scope of the Act. It would also risk capturing conduct that poses no threat to public order or safety.

It should also be noted that: I have applied for permits on multiple occasions over the past 15 years, and those applications were not granted. (Soh Lung's note: Jolovan went through the various applications for police permits which were rejected).

This shows that I have not acted in disregard of the law, but have sought to engage with it. But a permit regime must be meaningful and accessible for it to be legitimate. It should also respect the rights of citizens to peaceful assembly, as guaranteed in the Constitution. If permits are consistently denied, then the permit regime no longer regulates and instead acts like a blanket ban. In these circumstances, criminal liability would be disproportionate to the nature of the conduct.

Your Honour, the police seem to be refusing to grant permits to persons who are vocal critics of the government. Doesn’t this violate the principle of equality before the law?

The court must look closely at the words of the Public Order Act—such as "participate", "mark", "commemorate", "assemble"—and to interpret from them reasonable meanings where mere presence and quiet conduct will not suffice to fall afoul of the Act.

Finally, I would like to say this. To mourn, to bear witness, to resist, and to remember: these are human, universal acts of conscience and I urge your Honour to consider these factors in your deliberation."

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Singapore is not negotiating with Iran on the matter of safe passage of ships through the Straits of Hormuz. Vivian Balakrishnan, the foreign affairs minister, answered a question on this filed by the Workers' Party's Fadli Fawzi. I'm going to quote excerpts:

The Strait of Hormuz, just like the Straits of Malacca and Singapore, are examples of Straits Used for International Navigation. No ifs, no buts, no questions, as far as we are concerned, it is so. Now, what is the international law position on these types of straits? The position is quite clear. There is a right of transit passage. It is not a privilege to be granted by the bordering state, it is not a license to be supplicated for, it is not a toll be paid. It is a right of ships to traverse. This right is enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), of which obviously Singapore is a signatory and has ratified.

[...]

And the most important geographical fact that most people are not aware of: the narrowest point in the Strait of Hormuz is 21 nautical miles. Guess what the narrowest point in the Straits of Malacca and Singapore is? It is less than two nautical miles. So do you understand now why we have to take a categorical position on international law and that UNCLOS is the constitution of the oceans and this is a right? Transit passage is a right and not a privilege for ships and planes, and this is of profound importance to Singapore. 

So to your specific question, yes—I engaged the Iranian Foreign Minister before the war. And yes, I am sure I will engage him in the near future—but as a matter of principle, and not because we are taking sides, I cannot engage in negotiations for safe passage of ships or negotiate on toll rates because to do so would be implicitly eroding this legal principle. So again, this is another example of Singapore upholding principle, not taking sides.

Singapore has welcomed the two-week ceasefire between the US and Iran, but Prime Minister Lawrence Wong also said that we have to keep close tabs on the situation, because we could end up in a sticky situation if the global order continues to deteriorate. This means, he says, paying "particular attention" to defence.

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This one is not exactly about Singapore and is more for the media and journalism nerd in me: Esquire Singapore came under fire this week for an AI-generated 'interview'. The magazine wanted to do a feature on the actor Mackenyu (of Netflix's live-action One Piece fame) for its March issue, but just couldn't pin the guy down for a face-to-face interview. Questions sent over email also weren't answered in time, so they made the decision to feed his previous interviews into AI and generate a whole new interview for themselves. This, they said, was a "deliberate creative decision" to explore the "echo of a persona in the digital age in the absence of the physical subject", in line with that issue's "Echoes" theme.

I've been thinking about this a lot since I first found out about it (like I said, it feeds right into my journalist/editor soul). I'm not a fan of generative AI myself and rarely use it. When I do, I try to make sure that it's for a very clear, specific purpose; usually something that would otherwise require a lot of tedious, mechanical labour, like compiling statements and recommendations across multiple UN reports or something like that. I never use AI for writing because, to me, writing is fun, creative, and rewarding part, so why would I outsource it?

That said, it would be unrealistic to pretend that GenAI doesn't exist, and that people aren't going to use it. We have no choice but to think about GenAI, how we use it, and how it shows up in our lives. I recently had to write an AI policy for Mekong Review, because while it's not an issue we've encountered all that much, it's still important to articulate a position. I don't have an AI policy for We, The Citizens right now since it's just me and I don't use it, so that's pretty straightforward 😅

Without a real interview with Mackenyu to go with the photos, Esquire Singapore was left with the headache of having a hole in the magazine. But what does it mean to take someone's words (with, as far as I can see, no indication of their knowledge or consent), feed it into a machine, and make it spit out its approximation of that person's thoughts and opinions? And—apart from the questions about ethics, consent, agency, and boundaries—what is the value of such an AI-generated piece? What do readers actually get out of it? What insight, what learning, what connection is there to be gained? Is there a benefit to such content, or is it just content for content's sake?

The magazine hasn't apologised for this interview, and it's still up on their website. (I don't know what Mackenyu himself and his team think of this, but would be really curious to know—in their own words, please, not AI ones.) They say that they "appreciate the dialogue this piece has sparked among our readers and the industry", and that they have "noted the feedback for future editorial considerations".

I hope the "editorial consideration" is to decide never to do this again.

(Also, we're soooooo close to a nice round number of responses to the Mekong Review reader survey—so much so that I'm extending the deadline a little bit in the hopes that we can at least hit it and make me feel not so itchy 😅 If you've read Mekong Review—whether as a casual reader or a subscriber—I would really appreciate it if you took a little time to fill this survey in!)

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