In March 2025, Catherine Wu resigned her unpaid role at a hotel unit of City Developments Ltd, becoming the unlikely centre of a Succession-like feud between the property giant's chairman, Kwek Leng Beng, and his son, group chief executive Sherman Kwek. The resignation, announced in a statement from the elder Kwek, sent CDL shares up as much as 2.8 percent in early trading, recouping most of the losses since the dispute had gone public and underscoring how heavily the market was weighing the family drama.
The feud had erupted the previous month when Kwek Leng Beng sued his own son, accusing him of orchestrating a boardroom coup by appointing two new directors, Jennifer Duong Young and Su Yen Wong, without going through the proper nomination process. Trading in CDL shares was temporarily halted as the patriarch and the chief executive traded public statements, an extraordinary spectacle in Singapore's normally discreet corporate world. Sherman Kwek called his father's actions extreme and insisted the changes were never about ousting the esteemed chairman, but about strengthening the board.
The son identified the real source of the dispute as Dr Catherine Wu, 65, an unpaid independent adviser to the board of Millennium & Copthorne Hotels, CDL's hotel subsidiary. Sherman accused her of interfering in matters going well beyond her scope and exercising enormous influence, a situation he described as a very serious issue of corporate governance. Because of her long relationship with the chairman, whom she had met at a 1992 dinner and remained close to for more than three decades, the matter had been handled sensitively but to no avail. A former singer who has said she studied at Juilliard, Wu cut an unusual figure in the boardrooms of one of Asia's largest property empires.
On February 21, a board majority passed resolutions affirming that Wu had no authority to influence or advise CDL and M&C directors, management or staff, and terminating her advisory agreement. She resigned on March 4, with immediate effect. Kwek Leng Beng dismissed his son's insinuations against Wu as unproven and declared that with her resignation, the chief executive's camp no longer had any basis for its corporate governance allegations or to justify the board coup. On March 12, the chairman withdrew the lawsuit, with both men agreeing to put aside their differences for the greater good of CDL and its stakeholders.
The episode cost CDL its position as Singapore's largest listed developer, at least temporarily, and prompted downgrades from analysts including JP Morgan over the uncertainty. For observers of Asian family businesses, the Kwek saga became the latest and most public illustration of how succession, governance and personal loyalties can collide, even in an empire built over generations.