Succession in focus as father and son battle over CDL

It is first time Kwek clan has been so publicly embroiled in a family crisis

- Sue-Ann Tan

It was the year 2000 and the start of a new millennium. At the time, property tycoon Kwek Leng Beng's elder son, Sherman, was all of 25.

The proud father in an interview detailed how his son was gaining exposure in Silicon Valley, at the cutting edge of entrepreneurial developments, and trying to strike out on his own.

The older Mr Kwek was 59 then, already fielding questions on who would succeed him in heading his business empire.

But fast-forward 25 years, and the father and son are now embroiled in a public battle over property giant CDL, with the father, who will be 84 in 2025, trying to fire the son, now 49, from being group chief executive of the company.

What happened in the intervening 25 years to turn father and son against each other is a complex web that is still being untangled, littered with what the older Mr Kwek calls missteps and a corporate governance issue that crossed "a red line".

In 2000, the young Mr Sherman Kwek was already in the public eye, thanks to his famous father, who made the list of one of the world's 50 richest Chinese people in 1995.

But he did not want to join the family business back then, which encompassed the sprawling Hong Leong Group that controlled Singapore's two largest and most profitable property development companies - City Developments and CDL Hotels.

Instead, he wanted to set up his own dot.com business after graduating from Boston University.

In his interviews at that time, Mr Kwek was sanguine about his son not joining his business, which was also handed down to him by his father, Mr Kwek Hong Png, who died in 1994.

At a results briefing in 2011, Mr Kwek said: "I am not averse personally to getting an outsider to come and run the company...if my relatives or my son cannot perform."