KWEK LENG BENG

Kwek Leng Beng was born in Singapore in 1941. His father, Kwek Hong Png, was an immigrant from China's Fujian province who built Hong Leong into a sprawling conglomerate starting from a building-materials trading shop.

Kwek studied law and earned a degree from the University of London. He never really practiced.

The family business pulled him in. In 1972 Hong Leong took control of a small, struggling property company called City Developments Limited, and Kwek was handed the job of fixing it.

He did more than fix it. He built CDL into one of Singapore's biggest developers, with offices, malls, and homes across the island.

Then in the 1990s he went global, snapping up hotels around the world to form the Millennium and Copthorne chain. Today he is executive chairman of both Hong Leong Group Singapore and CDL.

CDL is the flagship, a property developer that builds and owns a huge slice of Singapore's offices, shopping malls, and apartments. Hong Leong Group Singapore sits above it all, a conglomerate spanning property, finance, and manufacturing.

Then there is the hotel arm, Millennium and Copthorne, with roughly 130 properties around the world, from London to New York to Singapore. He also controls Hong Leong Finance, one of Singapore's largest finance companies.

The thread running through everything is real estate. Kwek likes assets you can walk into.

Buildings, hotels, land.

Kwek thinks like a property developer, which means he thinks in cycles. Buy when things are cheap and scary, build or renovate, then hold the trophy assets for decades.

He is a distressed-asset hunter at heart. The Plaza deal was classic Kwek.

He bought a famous hotel out of a debt mess at a discount, fixed it up, and flipped it for double. He uses leverage and he is comfortable with the ups and downs of the property market.

He spreads his bets across homes, offices, hotels, and finance so that when one slows down, another is humming. And he keeps it all firmly in the family.

The Plaza Hotel. In 1995 Kwek and Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal bought an 80% stake in the famous New York hotel out of a Citibank-led debt restructuring.

They paid about $325 million, which was roughly $75 million less than Donald Trump had paid for it back in 1988. Everyone knew the Plaza, few wanted its debt.

Kwek did. In 2004 they sold it for $675 million.

He more than doubled the money on one of the most recognizable buildings on Earth, walked away with a global reputation as a hotel player, and pocketed a gold-plated AK-47 from his partner for good measure.

China. Around 2020 CDL poured roughly $1.8 billion in Singapore dollars into Sincere Property Group, a mainland Chinese developer.

The deal was championed by Kwek's son Sherman, the CEO. It went badly almost immediately.

Sincere hit a cash crunch, CDL had to write the investment down to almost nothing, and the company posted its first full-year loss in nearly 50 years. Independent directors resigned in protest over how the deal was handled.

It was one of the costliest stumbles in Singapore corporate history. The fallout poisoned the relationship between father and son and helped set up the brutal boardroom fight that exploded in 2025.

Kwek learned his first rule from his father. As Kwek Hong Png used to put it, if you don't have sales, you don't have income, and if you don't have income, you're dead.

Revenue first, always. Beyond that, Kwek believes in buying real assets cheap and being patient.

He believes a building has to earn its keep by being both useful and beautiful. He believes in spreading risk across property, hotels, and finance.

And above everything, he believes the family should keep control of the empire. That last belief is exactly what blew up so spectacularly in 2025.

The Kweks are a dynasty, and dynasties get complicated. Kwek's father, Kwek Hong Png, founded Hong Leong.

His younger brother Kwek Leng Joo helped run CDL for years before he died in 2015. A cousin, Quek Leng Chan, runs the separate Hong Leong empire in Malaysia.

Kwek's son Sherman Kwek became CEO of CDL in 2018. In early 2025 the father-son relationship detonated in public.

Kwek accused Sherman of serious lapses of corporate governance and an attempted boardroom coup, and he filed a lawsuit. For a family that prized control above all, watching the patriarch sue his own heir in open court was extraordinary.

Kwek trained as a lawyer. He earned a law degree from the University of London before being drawn into the family business instead of the courtroom.

He never built a legal career, but the training stuck. The man negotiates contracts and structures deals like someone who reads the fine print, because he was taught to.

When he bought the Plaza out of a tangled debt restructuring, that legal eye for the details of a distressed deal was doing quiet work in the background.

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