Tony Chan claims to have been the lover of Nina Wang, who was Asia’s richest woman before she died in 2007.

By JOYCE HOR-CHUNG LAU


HONG KONG - It began with a head rub for $6,500, and ballooned into enormous “feng shui holes” burrowed around the city, buried gems and millions of dollars. So went the apparent love affair between the eccentric billionaire and her feng shui master.

Since May, there has been a public courtroom fight over the will of Nina Wang, who was once Asia’s richest woman thanks to a fortune amassed in real estate mostly by her late husband. Mrs. Wang died in 2007 at 69 and had no children, so the battle pits the Wang family against a feng shui master named Tony Chan, who claims to have been her longtime lover.

Public fascination has come from the enormous sum at stake - estimated to be at least $3.9 billion - and from the quirky, though disputed, details about Mrs. Wang’s relationship with a married man 23 years her junior. She went by the nickname “Little Sweetie” and wore pigtails and miniskirts well into middle age but her innocent image was shadowed by decades of intrigue.

After the courts declared her husband, Teddy Wang, dead in 1999, Mrs. Wang became the self-titled “chairlady” of the Chinachem Group, which has built hundreds of Hong Kong high-rises.

At the crux of the fight are two wills: A 2002 one gives the assets to the Chinachem Charitable Foundation, which is linked to the family’s privately held company; and a 2006 version, which Mrs. Wang drafted while suffering from cancer, gives it to Mr. Chan.

“For a long period of time - 15 years - from 1992 until Mrs. Wang’s death, Mr. Chan was her close friend, confidant and lover,” said Jonathan Midgley, one of Mr. Chan’s lawyers.

Many details come from Mr. Chan himself, though he has long been married and has three children.

According to Mr. Chan’s testimony, the romance began in 1992, when he gave his feng shui client a head rub for $6,500. Mr. Chan detailed “married couple” activities that drew him and Mrs. Wang together, like cooking, traveling and digging “feng shui holes,” into which they would throw jade, coins and other objects for good luck.

On the other side is the Chinachem Charitable Foundation, which is largely controlled by Mrs. Wang’s siblings, though company representatives did not respond about what charity function the foundation performed.

The Chinachem legal team has tried to prove that Mrs. Wang was incapable of making important decisions at the end of her life; the 2006 will was written less than six months before she died. Medical experts described the tycoon as being incapable of keeping food down or walking unaided.

But other testimony showed that she was making financial deals, even on her deathbed.

By his own admission, Mr. Chan has already enjoyed Mrs. Wang’s fortune. Her payments to him totaled an estimated $258 million over the years, he said, though the figure could not be independently confirmed.

Before meeting Mrs. Wang, Mr. Chan was sporadically employed and living with his girlfriend in a public housing project. Whatever the outcome of the case, his life was drastically changed by what he calls Mrs. Wang’s “gifts of love.”