Singapore's richest family feud escalated when Catherine Wu, an adviser to City Developments Ltd chairman Kwek Leng Beng, resigned from her unpaid role at the hotel unit amid accusations of overreach. Kwek Leng Beng had alleged a boardroom coup by majority directors, a claim his son and CEO Sherman Kwek denied, saying the dispute centers on Catherine Wu's interference beyond her scope.
The battle erupted into the open in February 2025, when the elder Kwek — executive chairman of the S$3.4 billion property giant — accused his son and a group of directors of attempting a coup, bypassing the nomination committee to appoint new directors and stripping the chairman's authority. He went to court and obtained interim injunctions restraining Sherman Kwek and six independent directors from implementing board resolutions. Sherman Kwek denied any attempt to oust his father, calling the coup allegation a distraction from what he described as "a very serious issue of corporate governance": the conduct of Dr Catherine Wu, 65, an unpaid adviser to the board of Millennium & Copthorne Hotels, the group's hotel arm, whom he accused of "interfering in matters going well beyond her scope" and exercising "enormous influence."
On March 4, 2025, Catherine Wu resigned with immediate effect. Kwek Leng Beng announced the "irrevocable resignation" and declared that the CEO and his directors "no longer have any continuing basis" to make corporate governance allegations or justify what he maintained was a board coup. Catherine Wu — a former singer who has said she studied at Juilliard and met Kwek Leng Beng at a 1992 dinner — had been close to the chairman for over three decades. She had served as a director of the M&C board from June 2022 to January 2024 before becoming an adviser in August 2024. The chairman thanked her for her service; the CEO's camp treated her exit as the removal of the obstacle they had flagged.
Investors hated the spectacle. City Developments Ltd shares fell after a trading halt was lifted, and the company lost its position as Singapore's largest listed developer. The war of statements continued: the chairman's camp pointed to a S$1.9 billion extraordinary loss in FY2020 and a 94 per cent profit decline in the first half of 2023 under Sherman Kwek's leadership, while accusing the CEO's side of breaching SGX listing rules; the CEO's camp insisted the governance concerns were genuine and had been handled sensitively "to no avail."
The feud — pitting the family patriarch against his son at the helm of one of Singapore's most storied family businesses — remains the country's most public succession drama. With court undertakings in place and both sides claiming the mantle of good governance, shareholders are left waiting to see whether the Kwek family can restore calm to the Hong Leong empire's crown jewel.