Stanley Ho, the opportunistic casino tycoon who led the transformation of the tiny territory of Macau, off the coast of China, into the world’s most lucrative gambling destination, died on Tuesday in Hong Kong. He was 98.To get more news about stanley ho family, you can visit shine news official website.
In building his multibillion-dollar empire, Mr. Ho sometimes fought but more often negotiated and collaborated with the powers who threatened to defeat him. They included the Japanese, who occupied his homeland during World War II; the Chinese criminal gangs known as triads; the Communist government on mainland China; and United States gambling entrepreneurs, who sought to turn Macau into an Asian Las Vegas.
Mr. Ho exploited China’s reputation for producing the world’s most passionate gamblers in amassing a family fortune that Bloomberg estimated at more than $12 billion in 2017.
Operating or owning 20 casinos and related businesses, he employed a quarter of the labor force in Macau, a former Portuguese colony that is a short ferry ride from Hong Kong. (His company financed a fleet of hydrofoils to carry gamblers to the casinos.) For years his enterprises accounted for more than 70 percent of Macau’s tax revenue.
Like many Chinese entrepreneurs, Mr. Ho, a father of 17, personified the potential pitfalls faced by lucrative family-controlled businesses toward the end of their founders’ lives. His final years were marked by bitter, public bickering among his 14 surviving children by four wives, many of whom tried to push him aside and claim stakes in his empire.
In early 2011, while Mr. Ho was recovering from brain surgery, the families of his second and third wives fought for control of his business. His lawyer asserted that Mr. Ho’s relatives had duped him into signing over his remaining shares. When Mr. Ho regained his strength, his relatives backed off and made public amends.
“He’s the kind of guy who won’t accept defeat,” Ricardo Pinto, the publisher of the magazine The Macau Closer, said in an interview with The New York Times in 2007. In a rare interview, Mr. Ho told The Closer that same year, “I love challenges and never accept the answer ‘no’ easily.”Stanley Ho Hung Sun was born on Nov. 25, 1921, into a prominent Hong Kong family whose fortune collapsed during the global Great Depression. His grandfather was a comprador, or business intermediary, for Jardine Matheson, the British trading house, in its dealings with China and colonial Hong Kong.
His father, a comprador for Sassoon, another powerful British trading house, went broke during the 1930s and moved to Southeast Asia, leaving his family behind in poverty. Then, in 1941, the Japanese occupied Hong Kong, forcing young Stanley to drop out of college and flee to Macau with other refugees.
In Macau, Mr. Ho was hired as a clerk by a Japanese-owned import-export firm. His employers were so impressed by his business instincts that they made him a partner in 1943. He was 22.
According to “Asian Godfathers: Money and Power in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia,” a 2007 book by Joe Studwell, Mr. Ho made his first fortune smuggling luxury goods into the Chinese mainland during World War II while collaborating with the Japanese. Mr. Ho would later contend that the Japanese had paid him partly in foodstuffs, which he distributed to Macau’s starving poor.
But he used much of the proceeds from his wartime smuggling to start a construction company, which reaped a fortune in the war’s aftermath, when Hong Kong experienced a building boom.