Three years after Abby Choi’s remains were found in Tai Po, a Hong Kong jury must decide who owned her Ho Man Tin flat, a property reporting has priced four different ways.
“If she died, the flat would be in his name and he could move back there.” Prosecutor Charlotte Draycott, opening speech at the Hong Kong High Court, 30 September 2026.
Abby Choi was 28, a model and influencer with four children, when she was killed in February 2023. The flat Draycott was describing is at the Kadooria, a residential complex in Ho Man Tin, and it was not registered in Choi’s name. Since 21 September 2026, a nine-member jury has been working through why.
Three men are on trial: her ex-husband Alex Kwong, 31, his elder brother Anthony Kwong, 35, and their father Kwong Kau, 68, who the court heard had worked as a taxi driver, though his lawyer disputed that. All three have pleaded not guilty to murder and face life imprisonment if convicted. Alex and Anthony Kwong have pleaded guilty to preventing the lawful burial of her body. Their father denies that charge as well. Two of those admissions concern what happened afterwards. The murder charge concerns what happened before.
Before February 2023: whose name was on the door
Choi’s mother, Cheung Yin-fa, told the High Court in October 2026 that her daughter put the Kadooria flat in Kwong Kau’s name to avoid HK$9 million in double stamp duty, on the understanding that he held it on trust for the two children she had with Alex Kwong. On Cheung’s account the whole structure rested on that understanding: the father’s name on the title, the grandchildren’s interest somewhere behind it. A nominee is a convenience right up until the nominee decides he is an owner.
The same testimony set out what else travelled in that direction: a monthly allowance of HK$20,000 to Kwong Kau, more than HK$200,000 towards his medical expenses when he was seriously ill, and, according to SCMP’s trial reporting, HK$2 million into a waffle shop involving her former brother-in-law. Cheung told the court her daughter had planned to spend about HK$20 million on a new flat in Tuen Mun for the two older children. All of it, on her account, moving one way.
The defence contests the picture. Kwong Kau’s counsel, Oliver Davies, put to Cheung that his client paid half the price of the flat, that using a nominee owner to reduce stamp duty could itself be illegal, and that he never threatened her family. She rejected all of it. Davies also argued that the Choi family was not as wealthy as Cheung had claimed. The position requires two things at once: that the flat was half his client’s, and that the money around Choi was smaller than her mother describes.
21 February 2023
Choi was last seen that day. CCTV footage shown to the jury has her getting into one of two vans used by the Kwongs, in the afternoon. Two vans, one afternoon, no further sighting.
24 and 25 February 2023
Parts of her dismembered remains were found at a village house in Tai Po. Police said they recovered human legs from a refrigerator at a rented ground-floor flat in Lung Mei Village, alongside two large cooking pots.
Three arrests followed the same day: Anthony Kwong, who had worked as Choi’s personal driver and business partner; Kwong Kau; and Alex Kwong’s mother, Jenny Li Sui-heung. Alex Kwong was arrested the next day while planning to leave Hong Kong.
Later in 2023: the arithmetic of an estate
Choi’s estate was estimated at HK$300 million, about US$38.3 million, and settling it was expected to take up to five years before her four children could inherit, according to SCMP’s 2023 report, which attributed the timeline to friends and her partner rather than to any court filing. Her children were then aged three, six, eight and 10. The Independent Singapore reported a narrower figure that year, putting her personal net worth above HK$100 million, which is closer to what Cheung later told the court sat in her daughter’s accounts. The two numbers need not contradict each other. One counts what she held; the other counts what surrounded her.
Her partner, Chris Tam, whose father founded the TamJai Yunnan Mixian noodle chain, replied in writing to the same paper. “I met her when we were still nobodies. I am a very simple person and an introvert, and our conversations were mostly about our family and children,” he wrote. They held a wedding in 2016 but never registered the marriage. The two younger children are his.
Cheung testified that Tam’s father had gifted Choi a flat at Manhattan Hill worth about HK$42 million and provided investment funds over the years, and estimated the Tam family had given her daughter more than HK$300 million in total. Money arriving from one family, money leaving towards another, and a young woman in the middle of both ledgers.
June 2024
Alex Kwong was sentenced to three and a half years for stealing HK$6.3 million of gold and jewellery and absconding before his theft trial began in 2015. A separate case, long predating any of this. He had already been, once, a man who did not turn up.
October 2025
Jenny Li was jailed for 18 months for perverting the course of justice, after urging her son to go into hiding.
27 January 2026
The three defendants appeared together before Deputy High Court Judge Brian Keith for the first time. The murder trial was set for September.
21 September 2026
Dozens queued outside the High Court for the opening. The trial was expected to run about 45 days, which would have taken it to early November. It has not been that tidy.
30 September to 2 October 2026
Draycott told the jury that the family dispute over money was the root cause of the killing, and leaned on the gap between the two families’ means. She said that days before Choi was reported missing the defendants bought equipment later used to cut up and dispose of her body, including a mincing machine. A hammer was displayed to the jury, with a forensic report cited saying that the blunt-instrument injuries to Choi’s skull matched its shape.
Then the valuations. The prosecution’s own opening valued the Ho Man Tin flat at HK$60 million, per CNN’s report of the day. SCMP and AFP trial reports have consistently put it at HK$72 million. Reporting in 2023 put it at HK$72.8 million to HK$73 million. Three years of coverage, four numbers, one flat.
The week of 5 October 2026
Cheung Yin-fa was cross-examined over whether the Kadooria flat was ever meant as a gift to the Kwongs, and over a suggestion that Kwong Kau had money of his own. She told the court it was impossible that he could have found HK$6 million to HK$7 million for a Rolls-Royce when, by her account, her daughter’s credit card had covered HK$200,000 of his medical bills. The defence needs the car to be his. The mother’s answer was that the hospital bills were hers.
She called him a “cunning old fox”.
Watching the CCTV footage of her daughter on the day she disappeared, Cheung told the court Choi had been a good and filial daughter who gave her kindness to the wrong people. That line, and the flat, are the whole prosecution case in miniature: generosity extended downhill, then withdrawn.
9 October 2026
Judge Keith told the jury the hearing would resume once legal arguments had concluded. The cross-examination of Choi’s mother was interrupted mid-flow.
December 2026
The defence case has yet to be heard, and no verdict is expected before the trial runs into December. The Tuen Mun flat stayed a plan.
Trial reports still describe Kwong Kau as the flat’s registered owner.
Cover photograph: Tombus20032000 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
