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Roy Ngerng found to have defamed PM Lee

SINGAPORE — Blogger Roy Ngerng Yi Ling (picture) was yesterday found by the High Court to have defamed Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in a post six months ago alleging misappropriation of money paid by Singaporeans to the Central Provident Fund (CPF).

Roy Ngerng. TODAY FILE PHOTO

Roy Ngerng. TODAY FILE PHOTO

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SINGAPORE — Blogger Roy Ngerng Yi Ling (picture) was yesterday found by the High Court to have defamed Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in a post six months ago alleging misappropriation of money paid by Singaporeans to the Central Provident Fund (CPF).

Justice Lee Seiu Kin ruled that the constitutional right to freedom of speech is restricted by the law of defamation. The words and images in question in Ngerng’s May 15 post, Where Your CPF Money Is Going: Learning From The City Harvest Trial, on the blog http://thehearttruths.com suggest Mr Lee is guilty of criminal misappropriation of CPF money, he ruled.

The judge also granted Mr Lee an injunction, barring Ngerng from publishing or disseminating the allegation, or words or images to the same effect.

Mr Lee began the defamation lawsuit in May and applied in July for the court to grant a summary judgment, on the basis that Ngerng, 34, had no defence to Mr Lee’s defamation claim.

Addressing this point in his 39-page judgment, Justice Lee cited previous Court of Appeal judgments on defamation, including cases between late opposition politician Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam and former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew.

He wrote that he was bound by the previous decisions and rejected the submissions of Ngerng’s lawyers, Mr M Ravi and Mr Eugene Thuraisingam, that Mr Lee Hsien Loong had no cause to take action against their client for defamation because the Constitution provides for freedom of speech.

In deciding whether the disputed words and images in Ngerng’s post are defamatory, Justice Lee found that matters relating to the high-profile trial of six City Harvest Church (CHC) leaders — who are charged with misappropriating church funds worth more than S$50 million — were within the general knowledge of the ordinary reasonable person.

Given the widespread publicity of their trial, Justice Lee found that the case has come to be associated with the criminal misappropriation of funds in the mind of an ordinary reasonable person.

As such, he said, it is immaterial that the CHC leaders have not, at the time of the publication, been convicted of criminal misappropriation. (Their trial is still ongoing.)

Ngerng’s May 15 post had included a chart illustrating the roles of the church leaders, as well as a similarly constructed chart of the relationship between Mr Lee — who is also the chairman of sovereign wealth fund GIC — and various other people and entities.

The judge also disagreed with Ngerng’s lawyers that the blog post, when read as a whole, would not convey the meaning that Mr Lee is guilty of criminal misappropriation. “There is simply no antidote to the bane contained in the (blog post),” he wrote.

In granting the injunction against Ngerng, the judge noted the actions by the blogger after he was issued a letter of demand by Mr Lee’s lawyer to remove the offending material —which included making a video stating he was right to make the allegations and notifying several journalists of where some posts that he had agreed to remove could be accessed.

Ngerng has manifested a propensity to repeat the defamatory allegation and, therefore, a final injunction should be granted, Justice Lee said.

Both sides’ lawyers will now make submissions on costs of the summary judgment and damages will be assessed later.

Posting on his blog later, Ngerng said he was disappointed and had not intended to defame the Prime Minister, but would continue to speak up on CPF and other issues.

He is separately facing charges for public nuisance and organising a demonstration without approval, arising from a march in Hong Lim Park in September that disrupted a charity carnival held on an adjacent lawn.

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