Kwek Leng Beng
Singaporean businessman
Kwek Leng Beng (born 27 January 1941) is a Singaporean businessman. He is the executive chairman of City Developments Limited (CDL) and Hong Leong Group Singapore, the latter being a diversified conglomerate founded by his father in 1941. Under his leadership, CDL expanded globally through major hotel acquisitions, including The Gloucester and New York's Millennium Hotel, and held an 80% stake in the Plaza Hotel with Saudi investor Al Waleed bin Talal in 1995. He merged CDL's hotel chains into Millennium & Copthorne Hotels, which became the first Singapore-based company with primary listing on the London Stock Exchange in 1996.
Kwek developed several iconic Singapore properties, including King's Hotel in 1968, Republic Plaza in 1998, and The Sail @ Marina Bay in 2002. He was also involved in the early bidding for Marina Bay Sands through a partnership with Las Vegas Sands, though CDL withdrew in 2006. Forbes has consistently ranked Kwek as one of the richest people in Singapore; in January 2026, the magazine estimated his net worth at $4.8 billion.
Early life
Kwek Leng Beng was born on 27 January 1941 in Singapore, the second child and first son of Kwek Hong Png and his first wife, Tan Cheng Neo. Kwek's father—who had left Tongan, Fujian, China for Singapore as a penniless teenager—founded general trading firm Hong Leong a few months after Kwek's birth. World War II put a temporary halt to the fledgling business and Kwek's mother died from shock after a bombing raid.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8963128. VIAF identifies the subject as 315200087. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1941, 1995, 1996 and 1968.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kwek Leng Beng” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.