Family quarrels, cold wars: emails put Lee Kuan Yew’s private life on show as daughter’s feud with Singapore PM heats up

Awkward birthday dinners, ‘cold wars’, and dealing with an obstinate middle child: these were some of the vignettes from Lee Kuan Yew’s twilight years that emerged in private emails released online as a public quarrel among his three children sharply escalated on Friday.

Lee Wei Ling, the 62-year-old middle child of Singapore’s revered founding leader, released the emails on Facebook after her eldest brother Lee Hsien Loong, the city state’s current premier, launched a stunning broadside at her and their youngest sibling Lee Hsien Yang over their handling of the family estate.

The two younger siblings brought their dispute into public view this week with a scathing news release in which they accused the premier of abusing his power to harass them over the fate of the family home – a spartan, century-old bungalow near the popular Orchard Road shopping district.

Premier Lee in turn said he had serious doubts about how the two younger siblings – the trustees and executors of their father’s estate – had gone about drafting the final version of the will in 2013. He called into question the insertion of a “demolition clause” requiring the family home to be razed when Lee Kuan Yew died. The two younger siblings have stressed that this was their father’s expressed wish. They claim that the prime minister wants to preserve the house as a national monument to extract political capital from his late father’s legacy.