Jeffrey Cheah

Jeffrey Cheah (born 1945) is a Malaysian entrepreneur of Hakka Chinese descent, founder and chairman of the Sunway Group, who built from a small tin-mining company one of Malaysia's largest conglomerates and its model integrated township, Sunway City, and made education his second estate through Sunway University, the Monash University Malaysia campus and the Jeffrey Cheah Foundation ^{1 2}.

Cheah was born in 1945 at Pusing, a small town near Ipoh in Perak, the eldest child of a Hakka family whose father traded rubber and Chinese herbs; he studied accounting at the Footscray Institute of Technology in Melbourne and returned to Malaysia in 1969 to work as an accountant with a motor assembly company. In 1974 he founded the Sungai Way Group — the future Sunway — with RM100,000 of capital in tin mining, and from that base built the group's property, healthcare, hospitality and education empire ^{1 3}.

Cheah's signature work is Sunway City in Selangor, an integrated township of housing, universities, a medical centre, malls and theme parks built from the mining land. He founded Sunway College in 1987, partnered with Monash University to open its Malaysian campus in 1998, and saw Sunway University rise in the rankings; his Jeffrey Cheah Foundation has given almost US$39 million to scholarships and educational causes since 2018. He holds the Malaysian titles Tan Sri and Dato' Seri and was appointed an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) in 2023 ^{1 3}. No text read names a faith for Cheah himself — his honorary membership of the Kuala Lumpur Malay Chamber of Commerce is an affiliation, not an attestation — so his faith is recorded as unknown ^{1 2}.

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