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SINGAPORE: The hearing ended in a defamation trial involving Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and blogger Leong Sze Hian, with a written sentence expected early next year.
“Generally, it will take two to three months. He won’t have it before January, ”said defense attorney Lim Tean.
Lee, 68, had filed a lawsuit as a private citizen over a post shared on Leong’s Facebook page in November 2018, which contained a link to an article from the Malaysian news site, The Coverage.
Although the post had already been removed, Lee chose to pursue the lawsuit on the grounds that “removal does not remove defamation.”
The plaintiff said that the online article contained “false and clearly defamatory” allegations linking him to the 1MDB money laundering scandal. The content of the article was taken from the State Times Review page.
The hearing on the lawsuit began in early October this year. Final oral arguments were presented today after two rounds of written submissions. At the end of today’s proceedings, Judge Aedit Abdullah said he would try to make his judgment in writing “as quickly as possible”.
Earlier today, a hearing was held on another defamation lawsuit brought by Lee. This case was against Terry Xu, editor of The Online Citizen website.
The case involves claims made in an article titled “PM Lee’s wife Ho Ching shares a strange article on severing ties with family members,” published on August 15, 2019.
One of the accusations was that Lee misled his father, the late Lee Kuan Yew, into thinking that the Singapore government had listed Lee’s property as 38, Oxley Road, and that it was useless to uphold Kuan Yew’s directive to demolish it.
