Hong Kong, China: A Hong Kong bartender-turned-feng shui master who says he is the sole heir to the US$13 billion ($19 billion) estate of Nina Wang testified Wednesday in a court battle over the eccentric tycoon’s fortune.

Tony Chan appeared on the witness stand more than six weeks into the trial over Wang’s estate in a case that has gripped the tycoon-obsessed city.

The court will decide whether Wang, who at one stage was Asia’s richest woman, left her entire fortune to Chan when she died of cancer in 2007 aged 69.

Opposing Chan’s claim is Wang’s Chinachem Charitable Foundation, which is now controlled by her siblings, who say a will awarding Chan the huge fortune is a fake.

Lawrence Lok, the lawyer for Chinachem, started his cross-examination in front of a packed courtroom Wednesday by questioning Chan’s credibility.

He asked why biographical information on Chan for an American college’s fundraiser in Beijing showed he had received tertiary education in Canada, when in fact he had finished secondary school in Hong Kong but never went to university.

The biography said Chan returned to Hong Kong in the early 1990s to take over his family business and assets.

Chan told the court that the information was wrong, but that it did not come from him. He said he had neither the money nor the time to study overseas.

“I didn’t claim myself to be anything for that function,” he told the court.

Wang’s younger brother Kung Yan-sum told the court earlier that Chan had told Wang he was a paediatrician in Canada. Gilbert Leung, another witness and Chan’s client, testified that Chan had told him he studied medicine in Toronto.

“All these claims have a common nexus, don’t they?” he asked Chan.

But Chan insisted he had not made the claims.

The feng shui master, 49, told the court that since leaving school he had been a bartender, machinery salesman, a waiter in a bakery chain and a market researcher.

He set up a company trading computer parts in China in the early 1980s which closed down around 1988. He remained unemployed until 1990, the court heard.

Chan, who has advised some of his clients to burn real money instead of paper money to the deceased, admitted in his cross-examination that the practice was not based on any classical feng shui literature. Rather, it was the idea of his late father, a retired school teacher.

Feng shui masters such as Chan can command huge sums for their advice and have an almost cult-like following in Hong Kong.

Chan said his affair with Wang had started by the time his wife had his first child.

“(Wang) addressed me as “hubby",” he said, adding that he stayed with Wang in the evening at her home.

Wang left an estate estimated to be worth up to HK$100 billion ($19 billion), although the exact sum remains difficult to assess.

In her last few years, Wang became increasingly fascinated with feng shui, an ancient Chinese system that claims to harness natural energies and is widely used by Hong Kong residents.

The case has filled the front pages of Hong Kong’s media for weeks, and some reporters even queued overnight to secure a seat in the public gallery for the first day of Chan’s testimony.

Before her death, the pigtailed, mini-skirt-wearing mogul fought a bitter eight-year court battle against her father-in-law for the estate of her late husband Teddy, who was kidnapped for the second time in 1990.

His body was never found and he was legally declared dead nine years after his disappearance.

During the fight for control of his estate that mirrors the current battle, Wang was accused of forging her husband’s will. She eventually won.

After his disappearance, Wang had built Teddy’s company, Chinachem, into a real estate empire with more than 200 office towers and 400 companies around the world.