Brian Cheng, the second son of Hong Kong’s New World Development chairperson Henry Cheng, has left the board of a key insurance company run by the family, in a sign that the potential heir to the multibillion-dollar business empire has fallen out of favor with his clan.

The junior Cheng, 38, last month left the board of directors of FTLife Insurance, a subsidiary of New World Development, along with a number of senior executives, records from the Companies Registry showed.

New World Development acquired the insurance company for HK$21.5 billion last year as its entry into the sector. Brian Cheng, who is executive director of NWS Holdings, a New World Development subsidiary that directly controls FTLife Insurance, was at the time expected to lead the newly acquired firm.

His elder brother Adrian Cheng remains FTLife Insurance chairperson following last month’s board reshuffle, along with vice chairperson Fang Lin and NWS Holdings executive director Eric Ma.

Adding to speculations about sidelining Brian from the core of the business empire is a family photo taken in May and showing all key members of the Chengs except him.

New World Development, founded by Henry’s father Cheng Yu-tung, has been passing the torch to its third generation of successors in recent years.

Brian Cheng joined NWS Holdings as executive director in 2009, focusing on the family’s infrastructure and technology businesses. He became a director at TNG Wallet, an electronic payment service, in 2017 when NWS Holdings bought 6% of shares in the company.

TNG Wallet was caught in controversy early this year when Apple Daily found that the e-payment operator had asked its employees to privately add credits to the e-wallets multiple times in order to bump up transaction amounts.

Some of Brian’s business decisions have ended up with losses. In 2018, he spent a total of US$7.3 billion acquiring a fleet of planes to set up an aircraft leasing business. The operations recorded a HK$64.3 million (US$8.3 million) loss in the first half of this year, as the aviation industry was hard-hit by the COVID-19 pandemic globally.

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