Zhang Lan sold South Beauty to CVC and lost the company and the lawsuit

Zhang Lan founded South Beauty (俏江南) in Beijing in 2000 and built it into one of China's best-known high-end Sichuan cuisine brands, with sister concepts like the LAN Club. The exit routes closed one by one: an application for a Shenzhen listing filed in October 2010 was withdrawn, and a Hong Kong listing attempt in 2012 also failed.

In late April 2014 CVC Capital Partners acquired an 82.7 percent stake for $280 million — but the deal was a leveraged buyout, with about $142 million borrowed from six foreign banks and secured against the company's equity, including Zhang Lan's 13.8 percent. Performance fell away after the acquisition; Zhang Lan said her shares had been moved to a Cayman shell company and pledged without her consent, while CVC accused her of inflating the books. She was removed as chairwoman, her assets were frozen in March 2015, and that June the banks placed the company under a takeover administrator.

The sale became a decade of litigation. In April 2019 a CIETAC arbitration panel found Zhang Lan liable for transaction fraud and misrepresentation and ordered her to pay CVC $142 million plus interest — upheld by China's Supreme People's Court in 2021. Courts in Singapore pierced her offshore family trust, and by 2026 a US court had seized $29.1 million of paintings bought in 2014 through her son's account, among more than $80 million of assets recovered across three jurisdictions.