Posted Aug 4, 2004, 7:55 AM
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Paris
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All about Nina :
Pigtails and tall tales
Jul 1st 2004 | HONG KONG
From The Economist print edition
An Asian business shows that nobody fights like a family
IN ONE corner is Nina Wang, Asia's richest woman, with a fortune of HK$19 billion ($2.4 billion), according to Forbes magazine. Even at the age of 66 she is still known in Hong Kong as �Little Sweetie� because of her diminutive stature and fondness for wearing girly pigtails, bobby socks and micro-miniskirts. In the other corner is her 93-year-old father-in-law, Wang Din-shin.
Reuters
Reuters
Where there's a will there's a Wang
The battle is for control of Chinachem, Hong Kong's largest private property developer with an annual turnover of HK$27 billion, as well as assets such as vineyards and meat-packing plants on the mainland, interests in a Taiwanese shipping line and stakes in American drug companies. The empire was put together by Teddy Wang, husband to Nina and son to Din-shin, who disappeared in 1990 after being kidnapped�for the second time�and was declared legally dead nine years later.
Since then Nina and her father-in-law have been abusing each other in court, setting a local record with a 172-day trial described by the presiding judge as �a chimera with a fire-breathing mouth that devoured a significant part of our judicial capacity�. Ms Wang contends that a will drawn up in 1990 and signed by Teddy a month before his disappearance left everything to her�not least because he was upset, her lawyers claim, by his father's �womanising�. Mr Wang senior argues that a will made by his son in 1968 named him as the sole executor and trustee of the estate and that Teddy had decided to leave nothing to his wife, whom he began wooing when she was 13, after he discovered that she was having an affair. It was only after Ms Wang failed to stop her father-in-law from declaring Teddy legally dead (his body has never been found and Ms Wang insists that he is alive and trying to contact her) that she produced the hand-written will that made her sole heir.
On June 28th, a Court of Appeal in Hong Kong ruled in favour of Mr Wang senior, declaring the 1990 will a fake. But the judges said that there was not enough evidence to prove that Ms Wang forged the document�a charge she was arrested and bailed for in 2002.
Ms Wang may take the case to a final appeal. To strengthen her position, she has apparently been buying more shares in Chinachem, which she chairs, and through which she has tried to make her mark (though her plans to construct the world's tallest building, the Nina Tower, were vetoed by Hong Kong's government in 1994). But the older Mr Wang may only have to wait for the courts to restore his control of the firm he founded. Meanwhile, the mudslinging is a reminder that, for all their virtues, family-controlled companies�of which Asia still has many�are vulnerable if the family is at war with itself.
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