SINGAPORE: Mr Philip Yeo will retire as a director of City Developments Limited (CDL) on Jul 31, the company said in a bourse filing on Tuesday (Jul 15).
Mr Yeo, 78, has served on the board of CDL, one of Singapore’s largest property companies, for 16 years. He is a non-independent non-executive director at the company.
CDL’s filing stated there were no unresolved differences in opinion on material matters between Mr Yeo and CDL’s board of directors.
Mr Yeo’s notice of retirement comes several months after a boardroom tussle and legal battle between CDL’s executive chairman Kwek Leng Beng and his son Sherman Kwek, who is the company’s group CEO.
In February, the older Mr Kwek had accused his son of attempting a boardroom “coup” and filed a lawsuit against him over alleged governance lapses, after Mr Sherman Kwek sought to appoint new independent directors without full board approval.
Mr Yeo had joined the feud on the side of the older Mr Kwek, publicly criticising Mr Sherman Kwek after the younger Mr Kwek named his father’s associate Dr Catherine Wu as the source of the dispute.
The older Mr Kwek subsequently dropped the lawsuit against his son two weeks after filing the suit, saying then that all the board members had agreed to “put aside their differences” for the “greater good” of CDL and its stakeholders.
However, during CDL’s annual general meeting in April, Mr Yeo said he was “very disappointed” with how some of the board members had pushed through with new director appointments earlier in the year, and called their actions “totally improper”, Bloomberg reported.
Shares of CDL closed down 0.2 per cent at S$5.57 (US$4.33) before the announcement.
