A Condo Chairman Posted About His Managing Agent On Facebook — It Ended In S$100K In Defamation Damages

The youth are often criticised for trivialising social media, and dismissing the consequences of magnifying potentially slanderous opinions to thousands of people.

But a recent legal case illustrates that anyone could get caught carried away, even those who should know better, and how this can quickly escalate into a serious lawsuit, especially when the views were intended to damage someone’s reputation.

The case involved Tan Eng Huat, the chairman of the management council of Bellewoods, who was hauled to court by CWL Facilities Management and its executive director, Derek Lit Wai Choy.

In short, Tan was sued for spreading falsehoods about CWL and Lit via defamatory Facebook posts and an email, back when the company was the condominium’s appointed managing agent (MA).

The dispute started during the fifth Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the Bellewoods condo on 15 October 2022, when the condo residents and Tan disagreed on whether Bellewoods should retain CWL as its managing agent.

Between September and October 2023, Tan began making a series of increasingly serious allegations against CWL and Lit. This began in September 2023 when Tan posted a series of four Facebook posts on a residents-only Facebook page named ‘Home @ Bellewoods’.

The members of the Facebook page were also the residents who would be voting at the upcoming AGM. At the time, there were about 600 members on the page.

The 561-unit Bellewoods was developed as an executive condo (EC) that was completed in 2017. The project is set to become a fully privatised condo next year.

In the posts, which started on 13 September 2023, Tan accused his condominium's managing agent of being unprofessional and violating parts of the Building (Strata) Management Act.

He wrote that CWL would try to ‘rebuff’ his private motion during the AGM, and that the company was attempting to “strip off the power of the general body and deprive (the residents) from (their) rights of voting the termination and appointment of the managing agent”.

He doubled down on 14 September 2023 when he repeated the same defamatory content. This time, he named Lit specifically and asserted that the executive director “will be misleading the general body by providing his ‘professional advice’ that the intent of (Tan’s) ‘private motion’ violates the BMSMA”.

A third post with similar defamatory content followed later that month, and a fourth post on 10 October 2023, which read in part: “This MA is a joker. We are wasting our money and paying for nothing.”

This culminated on 27 October 2023 when an email by Tan was sent to a number of different recipients while copying the Building and Construction Authority (BCA), and republished as a Facebook post on the same day to the ‘Home @ Bellewoods’ page.

When the 6th AGM came around on 28 October 2023, Tan was re-elected the chairperson of the 6th Management Council (MC) of Bellewoods. But his private motion to remove the managing agent was defeated, with 62% of the residents who attended voting against it.

Undeterred, court documents reveal that after this AGM, in the period from 14 November 2023 to 21 November 2023, the 6th MC, via the defendant, purported to terminate CWL as managing agent of Bellewoods and give the company a month’s notice.

But CWL rejected this since the one month notice did not comply with parts of the 2nd MA Agreement. Undeterred, the 6th MC issued a further notice of termination on 16 November 2023, that gave CWL two months’ notice, as per the 2nd MA Agreement.

In court, lawyers representing Tan put forward two arguments: defences of justification, fair comment, and qualified privilege. The most crucial point which affected the ruling by District Judge Chiah Kok Khun, the presiding judge, was how Tan had presented his thoughts as statements of fact, rather than his personal opinion.

So, what started as a private dispute escalated into a defamation judgement

Ultimately, it boiled down to the court's findings on the Facebook posts, the failed defences and the chairman's motive, which were proven to be malicious.

During his judgement, delivered on 25 September this year, District Judge Chiah Kok Khun considered the seriousness of the allegations, the extent of publication, the failure to apologise or retract the shared content, and the presence of malice.

In the end, District Judge Chiah found that the Facebook posts were defamatory and clearly referred to CWL and published to third parties, namely the approximately 600 residents of Bellewoods who were on the private Facebook page.

Noting that Tan did not apologise for the posts nor did he retract them, he rejected Tan’s lawyers’ defences of justification, fair comment, and qualified privilege.

District Judge Chiah also criticised Tan’s lawyers approach to the case, which he described as inefficient and unnecessarily lengthy, warning that such a “blunderbuss” approach wastes time and costs.

In the end, CWL and Lit were awarded $40,000 each in general damages and another $10,000 each in aggravated damages.

In a condominium, residents or management may encounter issues or disputes and retain the right to express them. The recommended channel to do so is to approach a  third-party for mediation, such as a Community Mediation Centre, Singapore Mediation Centre, the Strata Titles Board (if it falls within the 15 categories under the BMSMA).

When an opinion is misrepresented publicly as fact and found to be created with malicious intent, that’s when the line of what is legal starts to blur.