The Nexxus Building connects Connaught Road and Des Voeux Road in Central
The family of jailed Vietnamese property tycoon Truong My Lan has sold a grade A office building in Hong Kong’s Central district to entities linked to a Taiwanese tech tycoon for a reported HK$6.4 billion ($819 million), as the family behind a $12 billion corruption case continues to sell down its property portfolio.
Companies controlled by individuals linked to Steve Chang, co-founder and chairman of Tokyo-listed cybersecurity firm Trend Micro Inc, acquired the holding company which owns the Nexxus Building at 77 Des Voeux Road Central from a company registered to the daughter of Truong and her Hong Kong-born husband, Eric Chu Nap-kee, according to Hong Kong Companies Registry records.
At the reported transaction price of HK$24,185 per square foot, Chang is picking up the asset after values for Hong Kong grade A office buildings plunged 34 percent since 2019, according to a report by JLL. Local media had pegged the value of the 22-storey property at HK$9 billion in December 2022.
“We opine that the value of the whole building has dropped by around 30 percent to 35 percent from a peak at Q4 2018 to current date,” said Alex Leung, chief surveyor at Hong Kong-based CHFT Advisory and Appraisal.
The sale by the Chu-Truong clan, who had built a Hong Kong property portfolio estimated at one time to be worth over HK$16 billion, comes just over a month after the former head of Vietnam’s Van Thinh Phat Group was indicted by a Vietnamese court on charges of embezzling from a local bank, forcing the Vietnamese government to take over the lender and helping trigger a crisis in the country’s housing market.
Heart of Central
Located a five-minute walk from the IFC complex at the junction of Connaught Road Central and Queen Victoria Street, the Nexxus Building has a gross floor area of 264,622 square feet (24,584 square metres) spanning 18 floors of office space situated above a four-storey retail podium.
Truong My Lan and Eric Chu Nap-kee
Records show that the directorship of the entity which holds the building, Mutual Company Ltd, has been changed from Chu’s daughter Elizabeth Chu to Taiwanese national Carol Wang Ting Hsuan. Wang’s registered address in Taipei matches that of Ming Yi Foundation and Flow Inc, both social enterprises founded by Chang. The transaction was first reported by HK01.
Wang serves as the CFO of Ming Yi Foundation and previously worked as a senior financial manager in the global strategic planning department of Trend Micro, which was founded in Los Angeles in 1988 and is now one of the world’s largest enterprise security software providers with operations in 65 countries.
Chu purchased the building, which counts Fidelity and the Hong Kong Bankers Club among its tenants, from a Morgan Stanley-Gaw Capital Partners-Pamfleet (now Schroders) venture for HK$3.6 billion in 2009 paying roughly a one-third premium above what the consortium had paid to purchase what was then known as the Hang Seng Bank building in 2006.
Rumours of a HK$6.4 billion bid for the property surfaced last October, two months after Chu was reported to have received a HK$6 billion offer from a consortium.
Fire Sales
With the size of Truong’s alleged embezzlement roughly equivalent to 3 percent of Vietnam’s GDP, authorities in the Southeast Asian nation have begun tracking the entrepreneur-turned-detainee’s ill-gotten cash, while Truong’s family, businesses and associates have been rushing to dispose of properties in Vietnam and abroad.
Truong My Lan has been in custody in Vietnam since 2022 (Image: Ministry of Public Security DSRV)
Last June, Chu sold a 132-key hotel in Hong Kong’s Tin Hau area for a reported HK$470 million – a 41 percent discount from what he paid to acquire the property in 2017. That same month, Chu took a reported 36 percent haircut when he sold a house in Hong Kong’s prestigious Peak area for HK$300 million.
In February 2023 the investor sold a commercial and residential site in the Quarry Bay area for HK$435 million – 36 percent less than what he reportedly paid to acquire the asset in 2018.
Chu’s remaining properties in Hong Kong include The Wellington office tower on Sheung Wan’s Wellington Street, which he acquired in 2017 for HK$3 billion, as well as multiple luxury residences in the Peak and Mid-Levels areas said to have a combined value exceeding HK$2 billion.
Truong, a former cosmetics seller who at one point ranked as Vietnam’s richest woman, has been charged with having used a network of accomplices to falsify loan documents granting access to VND 304 trillion in funds from Saigon Commercial Bank. The scam is alleged to have cost the lender VND 129 trillion in losses from February 2018 through October 2022, when Truong was arrested.
In November 2023, Singapore-based Viva Land, which is affiliated with Truong’s Van Thinh Phat Group, agreed to sell the Hotel Telegraph along Singapore’s Robinson Road for around S$170 million to S$180 million ($125 to $133 million), with the company incurring an estimated S$70 million loss on the disposal after paying a record S$240 million for the 134-key property in 2022.
The buyer of the Hotel Telegraph, Sunray Woodcraft Construction, was also a minority shareholder in a consortium that acquired the 39 Robinson Road office building from Viva Land in March 2023 for S$399 million.
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