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MOTORING tycoon Peter Kwee admitted in court that one of the reasons that several properties he is laying claim to were registered in his daughter Karen’s name was to avoid estate duty.

However, this could be achieved only if the owner of Laguna National Golf Resort Club retained zero beneficial interest in the properties, said lawyers acting for his daughter’s bankruptcy estate, in their written submissions on Friday (Feb 21) at the end of a nine-day trial. 

When Peter Kwee first took the stand on Feb 4, he said that estate duty was one of the things on his mind when he purchased the properties, and that he considered estate duty as a “risk management issue”. 

“If (Peter) Kwee retained a beneficial interest in the properties, he would be deemed competent to dispose of those properties… And these interests would be deemed to pass on his death… Estate duty would then be payable,” law firm Shook Lin & Bok said on behalf of Lai Seng Kwoon, the private trustee of Karen Kwee’s bankruptcy estate. 

Of the five properties being contested, two are landed homes in Singapore purchased in 1997 and 2000 in Karen’s name. One of them is a three-storey detached house in King’s Drive, and the other is a cluster house in The Teneriffe development. Both were purchased before estate duty was abolished in 2008.