A chief executive who showered his ex-girlfriend with Hermès, Dior and Prada items — and then sued her for almost US$370,000 (S$468,090) after they split — has lost his case in Singapore's High Court.
Chander Agarwal, CEO of an Indian logistics company, argued that the lavish spending during his relationship with former flight attendant Felicia Lee was a series of loans she owed him. Among the disputed items: designer handbags, tens of thousands of dollars in first-class flight tickets, life insurance premiums, a university programme, personal expenses run up on his American Express card — and thousands spent on a feng shui master to "spiritually harmonise" her flat.
On the last item, Agarwal offered a remarkable argument in court: as an Indian who does not believe in the ancient Chinese practice, the feng shui payment "must have been a loan." Senior Judge Lee Seiu Kin was unconvinced.
Dismissing the case, the judge found that the money was spent on gifts and could not be recharacterised as loans. The evidence, he said, clearly showed Agarwal, "smitten" by Lee, "had showered her with expensive gifts during their relationship" — and noted her "spontaneous reluctance to accept them" on occasion.
The pair met on a flight in 2019 and began a romantic relationship in 2022. It ended late in 2023 after Agarwal suspected her of cheating. He produced a handwritten agreement bearing both their signatures to support his claim; Lee denied ever signing it, and the judge ultimately gave the document no weight.
"It is incredible that for a relationship that lasted for more than a year with so many WhatsApp messages exchanged between them, the Claimant could not point to any written evidence to support his case," the judge wrote. The ruling is a cautionary tale for the lovestruck wealthy: in the eyes of the law, a gift given in romance stays a gift after the romance dies — and no handwritten IOU produced after the breakup will survive a courtroom without corroboration.
Singapore's courts have seen versions of this dispute before, and the outcome is almost always the same. Judges here draw a hard line between loans and gifts: without a written agreement, repayment terms, or contemporaneous evidence that money changed hands as a loan, large transfers between romantic partners are treated as gifts — however extravagant, however regretted. Agarwal's attempt to reframe Hermès bags and business-class tickets as credit facilities was, in the judge's telling, an exercise in revisionism.
The feng shui argument drew particular attention. That a man would spend thousands to spiritually harmonise a flat, then claim the payment must have been a loan because he personally disbelieves in the practice, struck the court as exactly what it was: a post-breakup rationalisation. The ruling joins a small but instructive body of case law on high-net-worth relationship disputes in Singapore, where the courts have repeatedly refused to let wealthy claimants rewrite the history of their own generosity. The message for the lovestruck rich is simple — if it is a loan, write it down before the romance ends, not after.