Drink to your Health

A military officer and banker a lifetime ago, CHRISTOPHER WILSON is now a Hero of Philanthropy with a foundation that brings clean water and healthcare to rural Cambodia.

- Gemma Koh

CHRISTOPHER WILSON WAS held a gunpoint by a group of Bedouins. The year was 1985, and the Sandhurst-trained soldier was on secondment from the British Army to the Sultan of Oman’s army, commanding a company of Balochi soldiers to protect its border from communists in Yemen. “My soldiers had arrested one of their relatives coming over the border illegally. They were beaten up by local Bedouins and our prisoner was taken to their village camp. I took six soldiers and went round to try to get them back, but got caught in a standoff. They cocked their weapons and pointed them at us. It was very tense. There was a lot of screaming. They wanted to kill us,” he recalls. Thankfully an Omani officer arrived after some time in a helicopter from HQ, and everyone dispersed.

Wilson was traumatised, but the situation served as a wake-up call. “It made me think that life is pretty short. It can go at any time. It gave me that attitude of wanting to do as much as possible with my life, to enjoy it, to maximise it,” he says.

Switching career tracks to work for a fund management company would see him eventually moving to Singapore in 1990 to set up its presence here. He was subsequently headhunted for a leadership role in a Swiss private bank in Hong Kong. There, he met his future wife Tan Su Shan at “a commiseration party on the night that Barings (where she worked) went bankrupt”. They moved back to Singapore at the end of 1996 to marry and start a family.

In Hong Kong, Wilson also met Cambodian Khov Boun Chhay, who was at the time setting up a bank in Phnom Penh. The two became close friends and around 2006, bought land in Cambodia with the intention of setting up a business together. While they didn’t keep the business going, they kept their resolve “to give something back” to the rural communities.