SINGAPORE — A veteran journalist who posted portions of a confidential audit report of a firm on his blog last year is appealing against a High Court order to reveal the source or sources from which he obtained the report.

According to a judgment released yesterday, Mr James Dorsey, who blogs about the political, social and economic development of soccer in the Middle East, among other things, was unsatisfied with the outcome of the case and has filed an appeal with the Court of Appeal.

The firm, World Sport Group, had applied for the sources to be revealed as it intends to sue parties that had provided a copy of the report to third parties, for breach of confidentiality.

The Singapore-based firm has been in a contractual relationship with the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) since 1999.

It alleges that the audit report prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory Service under instructions from the AFC — to review transactions, accounting practices and contracts negotiated during former AFC President Mohamed bin Hammam’s tenure — contains remarks defamatory of the firm, as the auditor was provided with inaccurate or incomplete information.

Mr Dorsey, who is a Senior Fellow at the Nanyang Technological University’s S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, had argued that he was entitled to protect his sources as a journalist and had produced a copy of the Singapore National Union of Journalists’ Code of Professional Conduct to support his claim.

But Justice Judith Prakash ruled that Mr Dorsey was not a journalist at the time and had blogged and tweeted “for his own interests and to disseminate his own view points”. In her judgment, she said: “The court orders a party to disclose his source of information if the plaintiff shows that it has a real interest in suing the source and this outweighs the public interest of preserving the confidence of source.”

While the public has an interest in the free flow of information, such interest has to be “balanced, inter alia, against the need to preserve confidentiality and to encourage persons bound by obligations of confidentiality to abide by the same”, she added.

She also noted that there is no “newspaper rule” here, unlike in England, where the courts will not compel a newspaper in a libel action to disclose the source of its information before trial. Amir Hussain