China:Asia's richest woman, Nina Wang, popularly known as Little Sweetie, who was a vision in schoolgirl skirts and pigtails, died in Hong Kong yesterday, leaving behind an enormous property fortune and an unsolved kidnap and murder mystery.
In January, Forbes magazine named Ms Wang (69) the 11th richest person in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong and estimated her wealth at €3.15 billion.
Despite her fabulous riches, the Shanghai-born Ms Wang was famously frugal in her personal life - she spent just €292 on herself every month, favouring fast food over haute cuisine and always buying cheap tickets when going to shows.
She cut an unusual figure, even among Hong Kong's flamboyant super-rich, with her brightly coloured, childlike clothes - a look she held on to right until the end. She could also be seen wearing traditional Chinese cheongsam dresses, most of them hand-stitched by her friends to save money.
"With deep sorrow and sadness, the Chinachem Group announces the passing away of its chairlady Mrs Nina Kung Wang on April 3rd, 2007," the company spokesman said in a statement, referring to her full Chinese name.
It added that her funeral arrangements would be made shortly.
Thoughts quickly turned to who would inherit her vast wealth. There were no details of how she died, though there had been speculation for many months that she had ovarian cancer which had spread to her liver and other organs.
Understatement was simply not part of Wang's repertoire. She built Nina Tower One in the Tsuen Wan district of Hong Kong, the tallest building in the territory outside the central business district and the 22nd tallest building in the world.
She named the tower after herself, but dedicated it to her husband Teddy Wang, who disappeared after he was kidnapped leaving the Hong Kong Jockey Club in 1990.
Mr Wang was declared dead nine years later. The internecine war over his financial legacy was the most brutal Hong Kong had ever seen. Mr Wang owned 200 office towers and 400 companies around the world, but he left no heir, and his father was keen that his vast riches should stay in family hands.
Nina Kung, as was her maiden name, first met Mr Wang when she was a child. Her father worked for the ICI chemical company, while Mr Wang's father had a trading company called the China United Chemical Company.
Both families were extremely close.
The childhood sweethearts married in 1955 after both had moved to Hong Kong and Mr Wang began his Chinachem business.
Ms Wang always maintained that her husband was alive and would eventually return. As co-director, she took control of his company and through a series of canny deals expanded Chinachem into Hong Kong's largest privately held property empire.
It was the second time Mr Wang had been abducted. Seven years earlier he was recovered from inside a refrigerated lock-up after Ms Wang paid an €8.25 million ransom. But this time he was not seen again.
Mr Wang's father, Wang Din-shin (96), campaigned hard to have his son declared dead so that the estate could be settled.
Several years later, one of his kidnappers claimed Mr Wang, then 56, had been held on a sampan fishing boat and then thrown into the South China Sea.
In 1999, Wang Din-shin succeeded in having his son's death declared, and he launched a civil suit to claim his inheritance. However, the matter was complicated by the fact that there were two, possibly three, wills. In one will, from 1968, Mr Wang left his father everything. His father said the will was written after he told his son of his wife's infidelity. Furious, Mr Wang tore up an earlier 1960 will that split his fortune between his wife and his father.
Ms Wang had a different version, a will from 1990 after Mr Wang had fallen off a horse - just one month before he was kidnapped. He left everything to his wife, and wrote the phrase, in English, "One love, one life".
A Hong Kong high court judge ruled that this will was fake, saying that part of it was "probably" written by Ms Wang.
However, in 2005, the city's court of final appeal overturned the verdict and said Ms Wang should inherit all of the fortune.
