Nina Wang

Nina Wang, who has died of ovarian cancer at the age of 69, was Asia's richest woman, with a reported fortune of more than £2bn - the result of a protracted lawsuit with her father-in-law that kept Hong Kong enthralled for years. At the centre of this was control of Chinachem, Hong Kong's biggest privately held property company, which also has real estate investments in Britain, a shipping company in Taiwan, entertainment businesses in Asia and North America, a US biotechnology firm, a Canadian video games enterprise and a meat-packing plant in China.

In the ranks of sober-suited Hong Kong businessmen, Wang was an original with her pigtails, impish grin and miniskirts which, she said, she wore "because I have great legs". Five feet tall, she turned up for business meetings with a large German shepherd dog, and sometimes took dinner guests to McDonald's, where she preferred the Filet-O-Fish. The last time I saw her, at a reception in a hotel in the Central district, she was carrying an aluminium case. It was, she explained, her handbag and "good for hitting anyone who attacks me".

Like many Hong Kong tycoons, she originated from Shanghai, where her father-in-law, Wang Din-shin, ran a successful chemicals, property and paint business under the nationalists and during the Japanese wartime occupation. In 1946, as civil war with the communists gripped China, he moved to Hong Kong with his son, Teddy. The young man's childhood friend Kung Yu-sum followed. They were married in 1956. She became known as Nina, and acquired the Cantonese nickname of Siu Tim-Tim - Little Sweetie - from a Japanese cartoon character. In later life, she commissioned a cartoon book about herself. Teddy built up Chinachem as a big player in Hong Kong's booming property market.

Despite their wealth, he and his wife were known for their sense of economy. Nina bought her clothes at discount shops, and, when invited out to dinner, they were said to borrow Tupperware containers to take uneaten food home. Teddy applied his tight-fistedness to business, and made plenty of enemies. In 1983, he was kidnapped from his Mercedes as he was driven to work. Nina came up with a £6m ransom, and Teddy was freed. He had been kept chained to a bed for 11 days and was found trussed up in a refrigerator where he had been held by the gang. It was said that he told his wife off for having paid too much.

In 1990, Teddy was snatched again. A Hong Kong source once told me that, as a precaution, he had had a homing device fitted into the soles of his footwear; his shoes were found at the dock where the kidnappers took him on to a boat. He was never seen again. Subsequent evidence indicated that he was thrown over the side when a police vessel was sighted about to carry out a routine check.

Refusing to accept that Teddy was dead until a formal legal ruling was delivered in 1999, Nina used her power of attorney to run and expand Chinachem as the "chairlady". But she and her father-in-law became involved in the lengthy suit about different versions of Teddy's will. A first verdict in 2002 found that one version, leaving the dead man's assets to his wife, replete with uncharacteristic romantic expressions from stone-hearted Teddy, was a forgery. That handed the fortune to his aged father, who sat in his wheelchair in court staring straight ahead. Three years later, Nina won on appeal, gaining control of Chinachem for the rest of her life.

Despite her eccentricities, she was a canny businesswoman, expanding the empire internationally, staying friends with both the People's Republic and Taiwan, earning political capital in the US by helping to fund the preservation of Bill Clinton's birthplace and giving $7m to Harvard for scholarships for Chinese officials. But, aware of her husband's fate, she was said to employ dozens of bodyguards.

Yet she failed in her biggest ambition - to build the world's tallest structure on the Hong Kong waterfront. It was to be dedicated to Teddy, but called the Nina Tower. However, it was on the flight path to the new airport. So Little Sweetie never got her final memorial.

· Nina Wang, businesswoman, born September 29 1937; died April 3 2007