Singapore’s Feuding Clan Is Testing Investors’ Patience

Bloomberg

Mar 03, 2025

The Kwek dynasty has defined Singapore’s skyline.Now a father-son feud is threatening to rip apart the filial piety that has kept the city-state’s richest business clan going for longer than most ...

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The war of words between the billionaire patriarch and his heir apparent has reached a point where family control of City Developments Ltd. is becoming a liability for minority investors. Before their spat becomes a permanent drag on the real estate and hospitality behemoth, the duo should split.Kwek Leng Beng, the 84-year-old chairman of the flagship property-development business, has publicly accused his elder son Sherman, the chief executive officer, of trying to stage a boardroom coup. (A court hearing is due Tuesday.) While denying that he has any such agenda, the son made his own counteraccusations: He said in a statement that interference by Catherine Wu, his father’s former personal assistant and board adviser, is the source of their dispute.The senior Kwek, who’s married to Cecilia and has one other son, Kingston, hasn’t responded to the fresh allegation. Contact details for Wu, who’s believed to be in her ‘60s, aren’t publicly available. Having studied music in the US and released her own albums in Taiwan, Wu has been under Kwek’s tutelage since she moved to Singapore in 1992, according to the Straits Times.All this public airing of family laundry is taking place against the backdrop of a botched China expansion. The investment was Kwek junior’s first big test since being named CEO of City Developments in 2018, and led to a S$1.9 billion ($1.4 billion) loss in 2020, the first for Singapore’s largest publicly listed builder since the early 1970s.To be fair, the younger Kwek couldn’t have foreseen Covid 19. And even if the group could somehow keep the bet going through the pandemic, President Xi Jinping’s three red lines — targets for debt, equity and assets — for overleveraged property firms made success all but impossible. In September 2021, the older Kwek decided to exit for $1. “I decide, cut loose, finish. Let’s move on,” he told his biographer.Investors would have liked nothing better. But to their regret, the ghost of the ill-fated deal is not leaving the father-son duo. Although Kwek Leng Beng says he wants to remove Sherman for “serious lapses in corporate governance,” he did bring up the loss again, calling it “staggering.” He’s finding it hard to move on.This wasn’t entirely unexpected. While the financial hit from China was substantial, the blow to familial solidarity was far bigger. One of the older Kwek’s cousins abruptly resigned from the board in 2020, and attributed his decision to the China debacle. The clan was taken aback. As the 2023 biography, Strictly Business: The Kwek Leng Beng Story, notes, the split brought into the open decades of internal disquiet. Cecilia, for one, took it as a betrayal. “It hurt my husband, it hurt my elder son, it hurt me,” she is quoted as saying in the book.Last week, all of that accumulated unease spilled over into the public square.City Developments shares plunged as much as 7% to the lowest since 2009 when they resumed trading in Singapore Monday. They had been suspended Feb. 26, “in view of the disagreement within the board in relation to the composition and constitution of the board and the board committees,” according to a company statement. The flagship has lost 60% of its value from when Sherman was named CEO. The chief executive and his chairman father need a mediated, out-of-court settlement. Before shareholders start questioning the family’s control, the dramatis personae should either reconcile or go their separate ways.The second option seems altogether more practical. The Ambani family in India and Stanley Ho’s gambling dynasty in Macau split up when the founders’ children fought for control. The Kwek clan managed to stick together, thanks to the foresight of the current patriarch’s father who died in 1994. Kwek Hong Png, a penniless migrant from Fujian, started a building-materials firm in Singapore out of World War II trading profits. He set up his three brothers in Malaysia. Their progeny, the Quek family, operate independently of their Singaporean cousin. The two branches don’t always get on, as Joe Studwell noted in his 2007 book, Asian Godfathers, but they do manage to do a lot of business together.A similar structure — a loose federation — could also work for a cleanly divided House of Kweks. Sherman turns 50 next year, almost the same age as his father when he finally took charge; Kingston is five years younger. If they don’t step out of their dad’s shadow now, they may end up with the same frustrations that had made Kwek Leng Beng run away from home in 1968, according to his biography.Thankfully, the self-imposed exile to Penang in Malaysia didn’t last long, and the UK-trained lawyer went back to what became a two-decade-long apprenticeship under a domineering father.That training prepared Kwek to don the mantle of Singapore’s wealthiest tycoon. From sparring with Donald Trump to snag control of New York’s Plaza Hotel in 1995, to launching a 70-story Singapore skyscraper in 2004, in a market that was down 45% from its peak, much of Leng Beng’s success has come from his own chutzpah. That was true even when he was under his father’s thumb. The 1969 acquisition of City Developments, the crown jewel, was his idea. Yet the 28-year-old got the scolding of his life for paying 43 cents per share to close the deal, one cent more than the paterfamilias had approved.The China misadventure notwithstanding, maybe Sherman Kwek is just as astute a businessman as his father. Or he isn’t. While it’s hard to predict how their dispute will resolve, a chapter is surely ending for a city-state known more for its efficient government and state-controlled firms — such as Singapore Airlines Ltd. — than any serious flourishing of homegrown enterprise outside banking. The Kweks have been exceptional. Never given a bank license, they’ve reshaped Singapore’s landscape.As the patriarch’s biography notes, few today remember that in the SARS-ravaged economy of the mid-2000s, it was he who had rescued the iconic Marina Bay Sands design — Sheldon Adelson, the late Las Vegas Sands Corp. boss, thought the SkyPark was “expensive and ridiculous.” In the end, though, convincing Adelson to build a giant rooftop ship across the three towers of the resort might well prove to have been easier than keeping three generations of Kweks connected.There was a time when tightly knit Asian clans could — with a mix of terror and devotion — achieve such cohesion. That ship may have sailed.","kind":"news","is_publish_news":true,"is_publish_highlight":true,"is_publish_live":false,"is_publish_wemedia":null,"editions":null,"column":"","sentiment":"0","news_tag":"","news_rank":0,"symbols":[],"gpt_button":0,"need_auth":false,"code":"91000000","status":"200"}}}