Exclusive | How Vincent Lo trumped the Donald in New York project
A decade-long partnership at New York’s US$1.76 billion Riverside South ended in a series of lawsuits, which Donald Trump eventually lost.
In the US and UK media, Shui On Land Ltd.’s chairman Vincent Lo is occasionally referred to as “the Donald Trump of China.”
It’s a difficult comparison, given Lo’s personal bearing; though the business vision, his dalliances with debt and his tabloid chronicled marriage to a beauty pageant winner do bear some comparison.
The experience of facing down Donald Trump in a US$500 million lawsuit in the mid 2000s is not something that Lo would discuss in great detail, considering that Developer Trump is now President Trump. Asking about it now elicited a sigh and a roll of the eyes.
“He has a very flamboyant personality,” Lo said in an interview with The Peak magazine, published by the South China Morning Post. “We all have to sit back and see [what happens]. It’s worrying to see so many retired generals there [in the US cabinet], so I think the world is watching carefully.”
Lo, in partnership with New World Development Co.’s chairman Henry Cheng Kar-shun had come to Trump’s aid in 1994 when the American property magnate was unable to service the payments on a 77-acre swathe of land in New York, known as Riverside South, following a crash in the real estate market.
The Hong Kong billionaires agreed to buy the land, assume the debts and pay Trump 30 per cent of the profits.
