Few topics in Singapore are as fraught as the soaring prices of the city-state’s coveted, multimillion-dollar bungalows and the identities of those buying and selling them.

In December 2024, Bloomberg News published an article reporting that Singapore’s ultrarich were acquiring these trophy properties through opaque trusts without filing the disclosures that would have made the purchases public. The article identified two government ministers: one who had sold his bungalow and another who had bought one in transactions each worth tens of millions of U.S. dollars.

Within days, the government invoked Singapore’s so-called fake news law, ordering Bloomberg to place a “correction notice” atop the article declaring that it contained falsehoods and directing readers to the government’s official fact-checking website. The two ministers then sued Bloomberg and its reporter, Low De Wei, for defamation.

On Tuesday, a judge ruled that Bloomberg and Mr. Low defamed the two ministers — Tan See Leng, the minister of manpower, and Kasiviswanathan Shanmugam, the coordinating minister for national security and the minister for home affairs — and ordered the news agency and the journalist to jointly pay 230,000 Singaporean dollars ($177,000) to each minister.

During the trial, which began in April, neither minister disputed the accuracy of the reporting on their property transactions, but their lawyer argued that the use of words like “shrouded,” “secrecy” and “cloaking” to describe Singapore’s luxury real estate market hinted at impropriety. On the stand, Mr. Shanmugam said the article suggested that he was involved “in a shady deal with the possibilities of money laundering.”

The legal standard in Singapore differs sharply from that in the United States, where public officials face a high bar to prevail in defamation cases. In Singapore, by contrast, courts have held that cabinet ministers are entitled to the same protections as private citizens. Government leaders argue that defending their reputations through libel suits is necessary because public confidence in a corruption-free government underpins Singapore’s success.

The case was closely watched by many because Bloomberg was the first foreign news organization in nearly four decades to go to trial to contest a defamation lawsuit brought by Singaporean officials. Several legal experts have described it as the most significant libel case in recent memory.

“We are very disappointed by this ruling but we will of course respect it,” John Micklethwait, Bloomberg’s editor in chief, said in a Bloomberg article. “We argued at trial that our reporting was accurate and served an important public interest, and we continue to believe that the ministers have imposed an extremely strained meaning on what was a solid story.”

“Our newsroom — and our reporter — conducted themselves with integrity, and met all our editorial standards in preparing the story at the center of this trial. We continue to stand by them,” Mr. Micklethwait added. Bloomberg declined to make Mr. Low available for interview.

In separate statements on Facebook, Mr. Tan said the case “has been about protecting my integrity and reputation,” while Mr. Shanmugam said he sued Bloomberg so it could not “get away with publishing lies and falsehoods about public officers.”

The High Court judge, Audrey Lim, said that the article made “grave assertions that directly impugn the claimants’ personal integrity, character and professional reputation.” She also granted an injunction requested by the ministers to remove the article.

Mark Cenite, who teaches communication law at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, said Tuesday’s ruling largely maintained the status quo. But he warned that it might have a chilling effect on speech.

“Cases like the Bloomberg case involve complex fact patterns and nuanced word choices, and predicting how a reasonable person would understand the words involves uncertainty,” he said by email.

Singapore ranks among the world’s most unfavorable legal environments for journalists, according to Reporters Without Borders. In 2002, Bloomberg paid about $460,000 in damages to Singaporean leaders over an opinion article. The New York Times Company apologized and paid settlements after Singaporean officials brought libel claims over opinion articles in the mid-1990s and in 2010.

Until this latest case, it had been years since an official in Singapore sued a foreign news outlet. In recent years, the affluent city-state has become a regional hub for many international news organizations. “It was always going to be an uphill task for Bloomberg,” said Eugene Tan, an associate professor of law at the Singapore Management University.

He added that the ruling is aligned with the political norms in Singapore, where “there isn’t any legal recognition or political acceptance of the media as a Fourth Estate.”

Mr. Low’s article centered on the market for Singapore’s “Good Class Bungalows.” With a minimum lot size of 15,000 square feet, these properties are Singapore’s most exclusive homes.

They can generally be purchased only by Singapore citizens, but in recent years, many Chinese billionaires circumvented this requirement by obtaining citizenship, a workaround that has come under public scrutiny.

By 2024, more people were purchasing the bungalows without lodging caveats, a public filing that secures a buyer’s interest in a property. This suggested, in part, that buyers wanted to leave little public trace of the transactions. Other sales were routed through trusts, obscuring the identities of the underlying buyers.

Among those who bought without lodging a caveat was the manpower minister, Mr. Tan, who purchased a bungalow for about $21 million in 2023. That same year, the home affairs and law minister, Mr. Shanmugam, sold his G.C.B. for about $68 million to UBS Trustees that acted on behalf of a trust called Jasmine Villa Settlements. In court, he said he did not know who bought the house.

Mr. Low testified that he had no agenda against the ministers.

“The only agenda we have is to report on the facts,” he said, later adding that the plaintiffs were “seeing ghosts and shadows where there are none.”

Singapore’s defamation law is rooted in English law, which has historically placed greater weight on protecting a person’s reputation than on safeguarding speech, as the First Amendment does in the United States.

Still, England has weakened its defamation law to allow for responsible journalism on matters of public interest. During the trial, Bloomberg’s lawyer, S. Sreenivisan, said the court should reassess the “Reynolds Privilege,” a defense previously used in the United Kingdom for such reporting.

Ms. Lim, the judge, said that the Reynolds Privilege is a “non-starter.” She echoed a 2010 Court of Appeal ruling that said constitutional free speech protections are limited to Singapore citizens, and that Bloomberg, as a foreign entity, is not entitled to this right.