Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and former premier Lee Kuan Yew filed the libel suit against Hong Kong-based Review Publishing Company Ltd. and FEER editor Hugo Restall on Aug. 22 over an article published in July on opposition politician Chee Soon Juan.

"We are planning to defend the defamation lawsuits vigorously and look forward to having our day in court in Singapore," Restall told a news conference in Hong Kong.

"We believe that the original article was not defamatory in any way and could not be read by any reasonable reader of the Review as alleging the things that Mr. Lee Kuan Yew and Lee Hsien Loong claimed," Restall said.

The article that sparked the lawsuit, entitled Singapore's Martyr: Chee Soon Juan, criticised the government's handling of a pay-and-perks scandal at the country's largest charity. The magazine also quoted Chee attacking the Lees.

Restall said Chee never said he thought any particular member of the Singaporean government was corrupt.

"He never said that and I certainly didn't write that, and I don't believe that," Restall said. "I think it's just ridiculous to read the article in that way. It's preposterous."

TOUGH STANCE

Singapore has for decades taken a tough stance on foreign media when they report on local politics. International media organisations have been banned, slapped with defamation suits or seen their circulations restricted when they published articles deemed offensive by the government.

The suit is the latest in a series brought by Singapore's leaders against foreign media and opposition politicians.

The government said it banned the sale of FEER, which has about 1000 subscribers there, because it failed to comply with its press regulations.

Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, which ranks Singapore 140th out of 167 countries for press freedom, slammed the government's decision in August to issue restrictions on five foreign publications, including FEER.

The government ordered Time, Newsweek, the Financial Times and the International Herald Tribune to post bonds of S$200,000 and appoint representatives in Singapore.

But a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Information, Communications, and the Arts told Reuters on Friday the government would not block access to the Far Eastern Economic Review's Web site (http://www.feer.com) as Singapore's Newspaper and Printing Presses Act did not include online publications.

"Singapore regulates the internet with a light touch," Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong told an Asian-European editors' forum on Friday.

"But the same laws of sedition and defamation apply whether on the Internet or in print, and we have prosecuted persons who have incited racial and religious hatred on blogs," Lee said.

Singapore's leaders have won damages in the past from media groups, including the Economist, the International Herald Tribune, Bloomberg, and FinanceAsia -- as well as the Far Eastern Economic Review when it was published as a weekly news magazine.

In November 1989, a Singapore court found FEER guilty of libelling then-Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and ordered it to pay S$230,000 in damages.

At the time, Justice L.P. Thean said Lee was entitled to aggravated damages against the magazine, owned by Dow Jones & Co, because of "express malice" by the defendants and the conduct of their lawyer Geoffrey Robertson during the trial.

The case stemmed from an article published in 1987 dealing with the arrests that year of 22 people, mostly lay church workers, for alleged involvement in a Marxist plot to subvert the government.

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