Some people saw it as a dramatic corporate coup, others said it led to the fall of the Kowloon-Canton Railway Corporation, which ceased its century-long operations just days ago.
Now, one year after the KCRC management feud, one of the main protagonists will unveil details of the tussle that resulted in his resignation.
Samuel Lai Man-hay, the former KCRC chief executive who clashed very publicly with former chairman Michael Tien Puk-sun, has written a book detailing why he resigned a day after apparently reconciling with Mr Tien and shaking his hand before the cameras.
Calling his Chinese-language book The Longest Week, Mr Lai details the long-term dissatisfaction he and his colleagues had with their chairman who, Mr Lai says, built his image at the expense of the corporation's.
'In a lunch meeting with a senior media executive, I asked him why his paper was particularly interested in stories concerning KCRC, regardless of how trivial they were,' Mr Lai writes. 'That executive told me, 'It is because you have a fun chairman - who is like a big fish among sharks. He regularly wounds himself, and that makes him very interesting'.'
Several times in the book, Mr Lai suggests that someone leaked high-level confidential material to the media over the years - including the Siemens incident, which made headlines in all newspapers in 2002.