OK Lim grandson loses Tanglin condo trust bid

SINGAPORE – The nephew of Lim Huey Ching, who is the daughter of former oil tycoon Lim Oon Kuin, has failed in a bid to keep a freehold condominium in Tanglin worth over $4.5 million from being part of his aunt’s bankruptcy estate.

The property is located in Chelsea Gardens in Walshe Road, which is known for its Victorian-inspired architecture and spacious unit layouts.

Denzel Pak Juin Tern, the grandson of OK Lim, sued the private trustees of Huey Ching’s bankruptcy estate, alleging that the property should be ring-fenced from creditors’ reach because it was held on trust for his late mother, Lim Huey Yih, the sister of Huey Ching.

Pak therefore claimed that the property should be administered under his late mother’s estate instead of Huey Ching’s bankruptcy estate.

Private trustees in bankruptcy are licensed insolvency practitioners appointed by the court to administer a bankrupt’s estate. They take control of the bankrupt’s assets, oversee repayments to creditors and supervise the bankrupt’s conduct.

Although Huey Ching is the condo’s sole registered owner and OK Lim had financed the acquisition, Pak claimed that his mother, who died in June 2017, was the sole beneficial owner of the property.

Pak claimed there was an oral agreement between the two sisters and OK Lim in 2000 for Huey Ching to hold the property on trust for Huey Yih, with their father first paying for it and Huey Yih repaying him later.

But Judicial Commissioner Low Siew Ling found that the case was “fraught with inconsistencies from the outset”.

“The Lims’ (in particular, Huey Ching’s, and OK Lim’s) attempts to explain them away only multiplied them – their answers contradicted themselves or each other, were belied by objective documentary evidence and, when the documents ran out, retreated into evasion and implausible excuses,” according to the Nov 5 judgment.

The High Court found that ultimately, the lawsuit was brought “not to vindicate any proprietary right of the late Huey Yih or Pak in the property, but (as) a last‑ditch attempt to place the property beyond the reach of Huey Ching’s creditors”.

As Sir Walter Scott put it in his poem Marmion, “what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive”, the judge wrote.

This is the second reported failed attempt by the Lim family to claim that assets are held on trust to try to shield them from creditors.

In 2025, OK Lim’s granddaughter Michelle Lim failed to shield three AIA Singapore insurance policies worth over half a million dollars from being part of the bankruptcy estate of her father, former Hin Leong Trading director Lim Chee Meng, who is the brother of Huey Ching and Huey Yih.

High Court Judicial Commissioner Mohamed Faizal found a lack of evidence of an intention on Chee Meng’s part, prior to his bankruptcy, to create a trust over the three policies for the sole benefit of his daughter.

He found that the documentary evidence relied on by Michelle comprised “either self-interested representations” or “mere assertions”.

In Pak’s case, the High Court found that the evidence from OK Lim and Huey Ching on the alleged agreement that Huey Yih would take the beneficial ownership of the property, “consisted of bare and unverifiable assertions that were unsupported by any contemporaneous records”.

“Neither was able to produce any incidental documentation or other evidence in writing, such as a WhatsApp message or e-mail, that recorded the alleged agreement for Huey Ching to hold the property on trust for (Huey Yih),” the judge said.

Instead, the available documentary evidence “overwhelmingly” suggests that Huey Ching held both the legal and beneficial interest in the property.

The judge found that Huey Ching “was the one who signed the sale and purchase agreement, the property was registered in her name, the mortgage was taken out solely in her name”, and the mortgage payments were made from a bank account of which she was a joint account-holder.

Huey Ching also continued to arrange for payment of the property’s MCST fees and property tax at least until 2024, the judge noted.

In addition, the judge found that Huey Yih did not repay OK Lim for the property with dividends she allegedly received as a shareholder of two shipowning companies owned by the Lim family in 2015 – 18 years after its purchase.

“Even after accounting for property taxes and MCST charges, the numbers still do not tally as the sum of the dividends is $120,356 in excess of all the expenses flowing from the purchase of the property,” the judge noted.

The judge pointed to another inconsistency in Huey Ching’s evidence. After Huey Yih’s death, the schedule of assets filed in 2018 by her estate’s administrators, Huey Ching and their mother, Tan Sook Eng, did not include the property even though the Lim family claimed it was beneficially owned by Huey Yih since 2000.

But in 2021, after the judicial managers-turned-liquidators of Hin Leong succeeded in obtaining a Mareva injunction to freeze the Lim family’s assets worldwide up to a value of US$3.5 billion, Huey Ching listed the property as being “held solely by her with no indication of any trust” in court documents.

Then in 2024, shortly before she filed for bankruptcy, Huey Ching “did a volte-face and formally disclaimed beneficial ownership of the property”.

She claimed she had “inadvertently” included the property in court documents in 2021 and was now changing her position as she had since been “reminded” by Pak that Huey Yih was the beneficial owner of the property.

The judge agreed with the private trustees in bankruptcy, who were represented by TSMP Law and Rev Law, that Huey Ching’s explanations for her change in position in 2024 were “self-serving and internally inconsistent”.

“Ms Lim had a tendency to fall back on purported legal advice to explain her previous inconsistent positions. Yet conspicuously, no evidence of any such legal advice was ever produced, nor were the lawyers she named ever approached or called as witnesses to corroborate her claims,” the judge added.