Late Malaysian billionaire Lim Goh Tong’s granddaughters lose bid to partially remove lawyer’s testimony in $410M inheritance dispute

The Malaysia High Court has determined that the witness statement by the lawyer, Low Beng Choo, does not amount to hearsay as claimed by the sisters.

“I find that the bulk of the impugned evidence does not constitute hearsay in law,” Judge Mahazan Mat Taib said in a hearing on Tuesday, as quoted by The Edge Malaysia.

The sisters’ lawyer had earlier sought to strike out certain parts of Low’s testimony in a hearing last week, claiming they constituted “hearsay” as they involved statements from the deceased.

Low testified during that hearing that the plaintiffs’ mother, Lim Siew Kim, had personally signed her will on her hospital bed while “alert and aware.” Low is a defendant in the case and also the lawyer who prepared and witnessed the signing of the will.

Mahazan ruled that the testimony regarding the conversation with the deceased constituted evidence of a witness who says he or she heard it.

“Where Low testified as to what the deceased told her, she is giving evidence of a fact which she personally heard,” the judge said.

She stressed that the ruling addresses only the admissibility of the testimony, not its credibility.

With the sisters’ application dismissed, the judge ordered the sisters to pay RM20,000 in costs to be divided among the four defendants. The trial is scheduled to resume on April 20.

What we know about the trial so far

The trial, which started last week, concerns a probate suit filed in January 2023 by the two sisters, 48-year-old Chan T’shiao Li and 45-year-old Kimberly Chan T’shiao Miin, who alleged fraud in the execution of their mother’s will, as reported by the New Straits Times.

Their mother, Siew Kim, was the youngest daughter of Goh Tong, who founded the Genting empire and, according to Forbesranked as Malaysia’s third richest man with a net worth estimated at US$4.3 billion by the time of his death in October 2007.

Siew Kim died in July 2022, leaving behind three daughters and a son. Under her will signed on April 28, 2022, the plaintiffs were each allocated only small portions of her RM1.6 billion estate while their two other siblings received much larger shares.

The plaintiffs discovered in 2023 that there were two earlier wills, dated Nov 2, 2021, and Apr 11, 2022, that set out substantially different distributions of the estate, according to Malay Mail.

Portions of Low’s witness statement that the plaintiffs sought to expunge concerned how certain markings in the 2021 will were made, allegedly on Siew Kim’s instructions to reduce the cash bequests from RM10 million to RM900,000 for T’shiao Li and from RM10 million to RM100,000 for T’shiao Miin.

The plaintiffs argue that the existence of multiple wills within a short span constitutes “suspicious circumstances” and that the drastic changes in allocation did not reflect their mother’s true intentions or sound judgment.

Hence, they are seeking a declaration that all three wills are null and void, and that their mother died intestate, or without leaving a valid will, according to Named.

The suit names their brother, Marcus Chan Jau Chwen, as a defendant, along with Low and the estate’s executors, Malcolm Fernandez and Chan Mei Yee.