Judge asked to rule on latest squabble over Nina Wang's estate

Nina Wang Kung Yu-sum's HK$83 billion estate is back in court, this time in a wrangle over whether she intended the Chinachem Charitable Foundation to have complete control over it as a gift, or to hold it as a trustee for charitable objectives.

The foundation and the secretary for justice disagree about how the will of the late Chinachem group chairwoman, once Asia's richest woman, should be read and have asked the Court of First Instance for a ruling.

The latest move in a long legal wrangle over the vast estate came after the Court of Final Appeal last year recognised a 2002 will leaving it to the foundation and ruled that a 2006 document purportedly leaving it to her fung shui adviser and self-styled lover Tony Chan Chun-chuen was a forgery.

The question that has now arisen is whether Wang meant the foundation, which she set up with her late husband, Teddy Wang Teh-huei, to be trustee or beneficiary.

The secretary for justice, who has a role as protector of charities under the Trustee Ordinance, says the will contains directions for the foundation to use the money for charitable objectives.

The secretary says that Wang did not intend to give her estate to the foundation as a gift, or to confer on it the power to change the objectives for which it was to be used, as the foundation asserts.

"We say that the will, as a whole, shows the testatrix [Wang] did not intend to give the foundation a free hand to decide what to do with the estate," Simon Taube QC, for the secretary, said.