SINGAPORE - A wealthy Singapore businessman has sought to tear up a S$9 million divorce settlement signed with his ex-wife almost a decade ago, after the shattering discovery that his first-born child was fathered by someone else.
The 64-year-old man, the founder and managing director of a manufacturing company, had agreed to an amicable split in 2014, sharing the matrimonial assets equally and paying his ex-wife S$9.3 million as her share. Six years after the divorce, when the eldest child was about 20, he learned that he was not the child's biological father, a secret kept from him for more than two decades of marriage. The identity of the real father was not disclosed.
The revelation left him incensed, and he launched a lawsuit to nullify the settlement, arguing that he had been fraudulently misled by his ex-wife, then 56, who had worked in his company. He claimed she had failed to tell him throughout the marriage and at the time of the divorce that the older child was not his biological offspring.
The ex-wife maintained that she had long ago disclosed to the businessman that the older child was not his. Apart from the firstborn, now 25, the couple have a second child, now 23. The sexes of the siblings were not disclosed for privacy reasons.
Both parties have since moved on. The woman remarried in 2015, about six months after the divorce, while the businessman settled down with his new wife in 2017. But the discovery reopened wounds that had long seemed healed, turning a closed chapter into a fresh legal battle.
The case provides a stark lesson on the consequences of withholding critical information in a settlement. Lawyers noted that a divorce agreement premised on a fundamentally different understanding of the family can be vulnerable to challenge, and that non-disclosure of such a material fact can give the aggrieved party grounds to seek nullification, with potentially enormous financial consequences.
The saga captivated Singapore, where the case was seen as both a deeply personal tragedy and a fascinating legal test. It raised questions about the limits of finality in divorce settlements, the rights of children caught in the middle, and whether money can ever truly settle the accounts of a broken marriage. For the businessman, the lawsuit is about more than the S$9.3 million. It is about a deception he says robbed him of the truth about his own family for over twenty years.