Journalist court-ordered to reveal sources

Journalist and blogger James M. Dorsey has been ordered by a Singapore court to reveal his sources for a report on an audit of suspended Asian Football Confederation (AFC) president Mohammed bin Hammam and his management of AFC's finances and agreement with a Singapore-based World Sports Group (WSG) on the group's marketing rights.

WSG initiated proceedings after Dorsey disclosed details of a PricewaterhouseCoopers report revealing payments to bin Hammam, quoted sources close to the AFC questioning the WSG contract and revealed that Malaysian police had opened an investigation into the theft of documents related to one of the payments.

WSG asked the Singapore High Court to order Dorsey to reveal his sources. In the court hearing which took place on 28 September 2012, the court ruled in favour of WSG, and Dorsey has been ordered to reveal his sources for the report.

The revelation of the sources will allow WSG to start legal action on charges of breach of confidentiality and defamation against Dorsey and his sources.

According to Dorsey, the legal action by WSG is an attempt at “indirectly discovering who within the AFC may have breached their confidentiality and also suppress any well meaning or good intended person from coming forward in the future and is seeking to punitively punish those who may have spoken against them,” he asserted in an affidavit to the court.

Read the full report from the court hearing on James M. Dorsey’s blog