PETALING JAYA: Along with his wife, Ong Beng Seng (pic) was named by business magazine Forbes among Singapore’s 50 richest with a US$1.75bil net worth last year.
Little is known about him but the billionaire had his humble beginnings in Malaysia.
OBS, as he is widely known, was born in 1946 in Sabah and was just four when the family moved to Singapore, where he went to school.
At school, he was known to be a long jumper.
He went on to get a UK degree in insurance and according to reports, made his fortune selling shipping insurance in the 1970s.
He has been described as secretive and “media shy”, and rarely gives interviews but has suddenly become the man of the hour after he was named in a bribery investigation involving Singapore minister S. Iswaran.
This, however, isn’t the first time Ong has been caught in a controversy.
In 1996, then deputy prime minister Lee Hsien Loong and his father Lee Kuan Yew were cleared after an inquiry into the purchase of several luxury apartments developed by Ong’s Hotel Properties Limited (HPL), where special discounts were said to be given.
In 2002, Ong was also part of a special group tasked with finding ways to restructure the economy after the country suffered its worst recession in 37 years in 2001.
His rise to riches began around 1975 when he joined Kuo International, an oil trading firm started by his father-in-law Peter Fu Yun Siak, where he would meet his wife Christina Ong.
They have two children – Melissa Ong and Jonathan Ong.
Ong later went on to form HPL in 1981 to lead Kuo International’s acquisition of luxury hotels and real estate ventures.
A year later, HPL was listed in Singapore.
It owns and operates renowned hotels such as InterContinental Hotels Group, Marriott International, COMO Hotels & Resorts, Hard Rock Hotels and Concorde, among others.
As of December last year, HPL had a portfolio of 38 hotels and resorts across 15 countries.
It has operations in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, the United Kingdom, Italy, Maldives, the United States, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Tanzania, Bhutan and Seychelles.
HPL is also set to launch a resort in Maldives this year and a 150-room hotel in Dubrovnik, Croatia, next year.
Christina, meanwhile, runs COMO Hotels & Resorts, retail empire Club 21 and London-listed handbag maker Mulberry.
In May last year, HPL, in partnership with Singapore’s state-owned investment firm Temasek, also bought the real estate assets of Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) for US$2.8bil.
More famously, Ong is also known as the man who brought Formula One to Singapore.
Singapore GP, of which Ong is chairman, foots 40% of the US$135mil cost in staging the annual race which has been held on the streets of Singapore since 2008, except during the two-year Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021.
In October last year, a new deal was signed for Singapore to host the F1 for another seven years.
