Hong Kong, Feb 2 (DPA) A Hong Kong judge Tuesday dismissed a claim on the $13 billion estate of Asia’s richest woman by a feng shui master who claimed to have been her secret lover.
The judge, Johnson Lam Man-hon, threw out the claim by feng shui master Tony Chan, 50, for the entire fortune of Nina Wang, head of the Chinachem property empire who died in April 2007 aged 69.
Instead, he awarded the estate to a charitable foundation run by Wang’s family, saying that a will produced by Chan to claim Wang’s fortune was not genuine.
The ruling followed a 40-day hearing last year which pitted 50-year-old Chan against the tycoon’s family who claimed he was nothing more than a “toy boy” to the lonely widow.
In his 300-page ruling released Tuesday, the judge said Chan was not a suitable candidate to inherit Wang’s business empire and that the tycoon’s relationship with him and gifts of money to him did not prove his claim.
Chan was virtually unknown in Hong Kong before he emerged claiming to be Wang’s long-term lover after the head of the Chinachem property empire died of ovarian cancer.
He claimed to have been Wang’s secret lover for 14 years, having midnight meetings after she first consulted him to try to trace her missing husband Teddy.
Chan claimed that Wang referred to him as her “husband” and had wanted to have a child with him when she was in her 50s before discovering she could not conceive.
Lawyers representing Wang’s family, however, claimed the will allegedly leaving everything to Chan was a forgery, possibly signed by Wang as part of a feng shui ritual.
Wang’s family argued that she never intended to leave him her vast fortune. She gave him large sums of money for his feng shui guidance, they claimed.
The alleged affair between Wang and Chan is said to have begun two years after Wang’s tycoon husband, Teddy, was kidnapped in 1990, never to reappear. Teddy Wang was later declared legally dead.
Wang inherited the Chinachem empire after Teddy’s disappearance, confounding critics by building it up into a multi-billion-dollar business conglomerate.
Despite her enormous wealth, Wang was known for being notoriously frugal, once claiming she needed only around $400 a month to live on.
