FILE: Kwek Leng Beng, chairman of City Developments Ltd. (right) and Sherman Kwek, chief executive … [+]
© 2019 Bloomberg Finance LPShares of City Developments Ltd. (CDL) gained after billionaire Kwek Leng Beng withdrew a lawsuit against his son, keeping the status quo at the Singapore property giant.
“The court proceedings have been settled and will be discontinued,” CDL said in a statement late Wednesday. CDL shares jumped 4% in early Thursday morning trading in Singapore.
In the case filed with the Singapore High Court in late February, the elder Kwek accused Sherman of an “attempted coup at the board level” by appointing two new board members without proper vetting by the nomination committee.
The case made public a brewing feud between Kwek Leng Beng, executive chairman of City Developments, and his eldest son, Sherman, group CEO. It sent CDL shares tumbling to a 16-year low earlier this month and the company lost its status as Singapore’s most valuable publicly traded property developer amid analyst downgrades.
With the case withdrawn, CDL said the elder Kwek will remain executive chairman, while Sherman will continue as group CEO. All the current board directors will also be retained, it added.
“All the board members have agreed to put aside their differences for the greater good of CDL and its stakeholders,” the chairman said in a separate statement. “We will all continue to focus on strengthening CDL’s business, in accordance with good corporate governance, now and in the future.”
The case had cast the limelight on one of Singapore’s wealthiest families with an estimated net worth of $11.5 billion. It was settled a week after Catherine Wu, an adviser at the center of the boardroom tussle resigned after the feud between the elder Kwek and his son became public, resigned.
Sherman has said that the dispute with his father was partly due to concerns that Wu, whom he claimed has a long term relationship with the elder Kwek, had been interfering with the affairs of CDL’s Millennium & Copthorne Hotels and that presented a very serious corporate governance issue.
The elder Kwek together with his late brother Kwek Leng Joo and their father, Kwek Hong Png, bought loss-making City Developments in 1969 and transformed it into one of the city-state’s largest property developers with a market cap S$4.4 billion ($3.3 billion). Kwek Leng Beng is also executive chairman of privately held Hong Leong Group, which was founded by his father in 1941 as a trading firm. His cousin Quek Leng Chan, also a billionaire, owns and runs a separate group in Malaysia, also called Hong Leong, a name that translates into ‘good harvest.’
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