Singapore hotel owners push growth
Summit site owners have Trump-like ambition
WASHINGTON— The Singapore coastal hotel where President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un plan to meet on June 12 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-story condominium and museum gallery project in midtown Manhattan.
The hotel on Sentosa Island, said to be a pirate haunt and later on a 19th-century base for colonial British artillery offi- cers, was purchased last fall by the Kwee family, a billionaire quartet of four brothers, according to media accounts. Forbes has estimated the fami- ly’s holdings at $5.5 billion (U.S.) and their budding hotel empire has ties to the Ritz-Carlton chain.
Both the hotel and the Kwee’s firm did not confirm the reports of the family’s involvement in the hotel. A hotel spokesperson 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.
In addition to their Asian holdings, the Kwees’ Pontiac Land Group is gambling on the skyscraper being built on West 53rd Street in New York, abutting the Museum of Modern Art. Partnering with the Houston-based Hines real estate firm, Pontiac Land Group secured $860 million financing from a trio of Southeast Asian banks to buy the18,000-squarefoot site, previously owned by Hines and Goldman Sachs.