Wang's fate now in the hands of the judges

The fate of Asia's richest woman now rests in the hands of five judges of the Court of Final Appeal after they heard closing arguments from Nina Wang Kung Yu-sum's lawyers yesterday.

The judges must decide whether or not a will purporting to leave the $24 billion Chinachem empire to Mrs Wang was actually signed by her late husband, Teddy Wang Teh-huei, about one month before he was kidnapped and presumably killed in 1990.

Lower courts have found that the documents were forged and that as a result, those documents did not constitute a will.

A previous will, signed by Teddy Wang in 1968, left everything to his father, Wang Din-shin.

Lead counsel for Mrs Wang, Geoffrey Vos QC, has sought to show that the lower courts were wrong to say the documents were forged because they disregarded the sworn statements of the Wangs' late butler, Tse Ping-yim, who was the sole witness to the alleged will. Tse died of liver cancer in December 1999.

Mr Vos also contended that those courts had acted as their own experts when it came to analysing the signatures on the documents.