Summit hotel owned by family with Trump-like ambition
The Singapore coastal hotel where President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un plan to meet on Tuesday is overseen by a wealthy Singapore family whose real estate development firm is pushing into the competitive upscale resort realm where Trump’s own company operates.
The 112-room Capella Singapore, which juts out of a lushly landscaped island in Singapore’s harbour, is owned by the city’s Kwee family, according to Singapore media. Their Pontiac Land Group company has been building a network of lavish hotels across Asia and the Singapore firm has even intruded on the Trump Organization’s New York base, building a 72-storey condominium and museum gallery project in midtown Manhattan.
The hotel on Sentosa Island, said to be a pirate haunt and later a 19th-century base for colonial British artillery officers, was purchased last fall by the Kwee family, a billionaire quartet of four brothers, according to the media accounts. Forbes has estimated the family’s holdings at $5.5 billion and their budding hotel empire has ties to the RitzCarlton chain, a rival to the Trump Organization for the affection of wealthy and business travellers.
Both the hotel and the Kwee’s firm did not confirm the reports of the family’s involvement in the hotel. A hotel spokeswoman said she could not “disclose details related to this event” and the real estate firm did not reply to a request for comment from The Associated Press.
But the hotel was among nine properties that the Kwees were said to have bought late last year from their former partner, Ritz-Carlton veteran Horst Schulze, who is still listed as “chairman emeritus” on the group’s website.
There are no Trump resorts in Singapore, but the Trump Organization has licensed the Trump name for real estate projects in the Philippines and India and is planning two Trumpbranded resorts in Indonesia.
The Kwees’ Pontiac Land Group is gambling on a skyscraper that is being built on West 53rd Street in New York.