Court Battle Sours Life for Hong Kong’s ‘Little Sweetie’

She’s considered by many to be Asia’s richest woman, an eccentric 64-year-old chief executive who sports schoolgirl pigtails, bright red miniskirts and the nickname “Little Sweetie.”

For more than a decade since her husband’s death, Nina Wang has run one of Hong Kong’s largest real estate companies, popping in and out of the news as a rare female tycoon, budding artist and occasional philanthropist. Earlier this year, she even launched an autobiographical comic book, smiling broadly for photographers next to a likeness of the comic’s pigtailed main character, Nina Nina.

But there’s less flair in Wang’s life these days. Instead of preening for the media, she’s hiding from it.

Wang has found herself at the center of a mudslinging courtroom donnybrook laced with details of family feuds and allegations of betrayal, deceit, forgery and adultery. Billions of dollars ride on the outcome.

If events break badly for the flamboyant heiress--and they well could--her problems will get worse. But even at this point, there is little doubt that Little Sweetie is in big trouble.

For all the lurid details, the legalities of the court case swirling around her boil down to a simple issue: the validity of a 1990 will that Wang claims her husband, Teddy, wrote just weeks before his kidnapping and apparent death. That document makes her the sole beneficiary of a family fortune estimated at $3.7 billion.

Nina Wang’s 89-year-old father-in-law, Wang Din-shin, maintains that the will is a Nina-instigated forgery. Although weak and occasionally vague during his courtroom appearances last month, he gathered himself together enough to launch some withering verbal salvos at his daughter-in-law, sketching her as a tightfisted, scheming woman who has shown no respect for him as the family patriarch and little sadness at her husband’s disappearance.

“A wicked heart,” he declared at one point.

Other relatives have also weighed in. A sister-in-law, Teresa, told the court that she had watched Wang practice her husband’s signature, then boast how authentic her version looked.

If the court agrees that the 1990 will was forged, Wang could face criminal charges and quite possibly lose the bulk of her fortune, because attention would quickly turn to an earlier will executed by Teddy in 1968. That document, allegedly drawn up amid the despair of learning that his wife had become involved with another man, in effect disinherits Nina Wang and leaves everything to his father.

To give credence to the 1968 will, lawyers for Wang’s father-in-law described in court how Teddy hired private detectives, who produced photographs that purportedly confirmed the affair.

Little Sweetie has fired some zingers of her own in sworn statements to the court. She characterized her father-in-law as a womanizing bumbler with an opium habit, whose incompetence had cost the family company, Chinachem, vast sums during the years before he passed control of the firm to her husband. Her Teddy, she declared, would never have wanted his father to regain control of the family’s money.

That attack led Wang Din-shin to testify under examination that he still kept a concubine and had at one time smoked opium but never became addicted.

Nina Wang has run Chinachem and administered the family’s assets for more than a decade on the basis of a power of attorney granting her control in her husband’s absence. She has refused to acknowledge that her husband is dead, insisting that he will one day reappear. But when Wang Din-shin managed to get his son declared legally dead two years ago--a step Nina Wang strenuously resisted--the fight over the billions began in earnest.

One recent day as the probate hearing in Hong Kong’s High Court No. 27 moved into its second month, a brief lull fell over the proceedings, with only 17 newspaper reporters and a few photographers present to hear expert witnesses testify about the contested will’s legitimacy.

But if the testimony lacked the drama and personalities of earlier sessions, it also seemed to offer little comfort for Little Sweetie.

Gus Lesnevich--a prominent American handwriting specialist who has worked with the U.S. attorney’s office in prosecuting high-profile cases involving the likes of boxing promoter Don King, former baseball star Darryl Strawberry and former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos--gave an unequivocal thumbs down to the authenticity of signatures purported to be Teddy Wang’s on the 1990 will.

“The four questioned signatures are not genuine signatures. They are forgeries,” Lesnevich testified on behalf of Wang Din-shin. He suggested that they might have been traced.

“You could almost put one on top of another,” he said. “If this were a low-profile case, I think it would have been decided very quickly.”

The following day, senior Hong Kong government crime lab specialist Patrick Cheng offered similar conclusions. He described tremors in the signatures as “telltale signs of forgeries,” adding that there was also evidence of tracing in the signatures of the will’s witness--a person who has since died.

Edward Chen, the lead courtroom lawyer pressing the case for Wang Din-shin, said there was more to come, including ink-dating experts expected to testify that the will was written after Teddy Wang’s disappearance.

The entire legal battle constitutes an unusually public glimpse into the personal life of one of Hong Kong’s liveliest, most enigmatic and, in some ways, most secretive, personalities--someone who bursts into the spotlight with her latest idea, all pigtails and effervescence, and then just as quickly disappears.

“A Tinkerbell,” summed up the Hong Kong-based newsmagazine Asiaweek.

Although a billionaire in a city that worships money, she avoids the black-tie circuit and lavish charity balls. Andrew Glenn, editor of the Hong Kong Tatler, a magazine that caters to this former British colony’s moneyed class, admits that he has never seen Wang in person during his three years on the job.

“I go to a lot of these functions, and you just don’t see her out and about,” he said.

Some suggest that she simply doesn’t have the time. In the past 11 years, she has diversified Chinachem from a property company into a variety of new areas, including biotechnology and satellite television.

In March, she reportedly expressed interest in buying the Vancouver Grizzlies basketball franchise. When the deal fizzled, one of those involved complained that they couldn’t get Wang away from a schedule that never seemed to end.

Still, when she does hit the spotlight, it’s usually with a bang.

In 5-year-old media photos, her smiling face peers out from behind a model of her grandest property development idea, a 108-story Hong Kong skyscraper dubbed “Nina Tower” that she had hoped would become the world’s tallest. When government authorities nixed the plan as an aviation hazard, she remained undeterred.

“I still hope to get a huge piece of land somewhere and build the world’s tallest building,” she said at the time.

In May, she traveled with a delegation of more than 200 Hong Kong executives to western China looking for investment opportunities. At one stop in remote Xinjiang province, she livened the mood by joining a group of local dancers on hand to welcome them.

She was bubbly again in July when she showed up at a local comic festival to sign autographs in connection with the launch of her comic book, “Little Sweetie: Nina Nina.” The comic features drawings of a doe-eyed, pigtailed little girl and her childhood sweetheart, Teddy.

“Some is real, some is fiction,” she said at the time.

But since the probate hearing began last month, Wang has been hard to find. With the court hearing expected to grind on for several more weeks and her foes carefully building their case against her, speculation grows that Wang’s next public appearance could be in court.

Then, once again, all eyes will be on Little Sweetie.

Marshall is The Times’ Hong Kong Bureau chief.