Chevalier's HK$900 million block: the 2009 will that locked the estate for 80 years, the 2015 will that gave it all to one daughter, and a chairman who does not know who owns the company

Start with the wish, because Singapore law has a name for it. A founder who wants his shares locked for as long as possible is asking for a trust with a long perpetuity period, and section 32 of the Civil Law Act 1909, applied to trusts by section 89 of the Trustees Act 1967, gives a Singapore-law trust created on or after 15 December 2004 a perpetuity period of 100 years, or any shorter period the deed specifies. Eighty years is inside it.

What the 2009 will tried to do at death, with the family waiting for probate and the shares in limbo, a deed could have done in 2009 with the founder still in the chair: a licensed trust company as registered holder of the 62.9 per cent, the founder and then a named successor directing the votes, income to the widow and children under written rules, capital locked for the period he chose.

That single act would have removed the block from every question the court has spent 27 days on. A will governs what a person owns at death. Shares settled in 2009 are not owned by the founder in 2015, so a will signed three days after a cancer diagnosis could not have given them to anyone, whatever a solicitor's partner suggested.

The residue would still pass by will, and a will over the residue could still be attacked, but the attack would be over the ten parts, not over the company. Chevalier's chairman would have known who the owner was for the last eight years, because the owner would be a trustee whose deed says who instructs it, and the stock exchange would have had one disclosure of interest instead of three competing ones.

Now the two documents. The 2009 will exists only as an unsigned copy, and Singapore's rule is the same as Hong Kong's: section 6 of the Wills Act 1838 makes no will valid unless it is in writing, signed at its foot by the testator, with that signature made or acknowledged in the presence of two or more witnesses present at the same time, who then subscribe in his presence. A plan that lives in an unsigned draft is a plan that does not exist.

The 2015 will exists, and its weakness is the process: instructions by telephone and email through one daughter, a diagnosis on 26 October, a will on 29 October, surgery to follow. Singapore has no statute that cures that. It has a practice: the solicitor takes instructions from the testator alone, writes a contemporaneous note of his reasons in his own words, including why the only son is excluded, and has a doctor record capacity the same day. None of that stops a sibling suing. All of it decides who wins.

Then the window, which is where Singapore's answer is not practice but statute. The trust was discussed and never settled; in January 2016 the founder had a stroke; from that day no one could settle it for him, and the half-built plan stood for thirty months until his death.

Section 23 of the Mental Capacity Act 2008 gives the Singapore court, for a person who has lost capacity, the power to make decisions over his property and affairs that include the settlement of any of his property by way of trust, whether for his benefit or for the benefit of others (section 23(1)(h)), and the execution of a will for him (section 23(1)(k)). A family holding a drafted but unsigned deed, correspondence with two accounting firms and a 2009 will that says 80 years could have asked the court to complete what the founder had begun, on the evidence of what he wanted. The plan would not have died with his capacity.

Two more Singapore details fit this family precisely. Section 90 of the Trustees Act 1967 provides that where a person who was neither a Singapore citizen nor domiciled in Singapore creates a lifetime trust of movables governed by Singapore law with Singapore-resident trustees, no rule of inheritance or succession affects its validity; Hong Kong has no forced heirship, so the shield is not the point, but the same section confirms that a Hong Kong founder settling Hong Kong-listed shares into a Singapore trust is doing something the statute contemplates.

And the trust would have answered the question Violet answered with her own money: whether the daughter who received everything was meant to hold it for her brother. A deed says so, or says not, in a clause; a will that gives one child the whole block and leaves the son to his sister's conscience is not a plan, it is a hope with a signature.

The honest limits. Singapore does not stop an eldest daughter litigating, and a lifetime trust can be attacked on the same grounds as a will, capacity and undue influence, if it was settled in the same three-day window; the answer is that a deed settled in 2009, when the founder was 73 and running the company, is not the same document as a will signed in 2015.

Singapore does not make a listed company's board obey a family deed; it makes the shareholder of record a trustee that can vote, which is what has been missing since 2018. And Singapore does not resolve which of two daughters' accounts of their father is true. It removes the need to decide, because the founder would have said it himself, in a deed, while everyone was alive and nobody was asking who the boss was.