Macau gambling tycoon Stanley Ho (何鴻燊) is suing relatives he has accused of trying to steal his vast casino empire, the latest twist after a bizarre TV appearance on Wednesday that seemed to end the nasty family feud.
Within hours of appearing on a local TV station to say the spat had been resolved, Ho filed a lawsuit in Hong Kong’s High Court. The suit seeks an injunction to stop relatives from claiming ownership over his Sociedade de Turismo e Diversoes de Macau SA (SJM) holdings, the centerpiece of Ho’s US$3.1 billion fortune.
The claim, which appears to be signed by Ho, also seeks unspecified damages against four of the 11 defendants, including three of his children — two of whom, Pansy (何超瓊) and Lawrence Ho (何猷龍), run rival gambling concessions in Macau.
It alleges the group “improperly and/or illegally” moved to change the share structure at a holding company that ultimately controls Ho’s flagship firm, whose interests including 17 Macau casinos and several hotels.
Gordon Oldham, a lawyer acting for Ho, yesterday insisted Ho had been coerced into reconciling with family members on live TV on Wednesday, with the wheelchair-bound Ho struggling to read a giant cue card.
“I asked him for an explanation about his earlier appearance on TV,” Oldham told Hong Kong broadcaster Cable News.
“He said that he felt very pressurized by his family to read out that statement. He wasn’t at all happy in doing so,” Oldham said.
Oldham could not be immediately reached to comment further.
Ho has a complicated family tree with 17 children born to four women whom he refers to as his wives.
Oldham has said that Ho was legally married only to the first, Clementina Leitao (黎婉華), who died in 2004, and that the rest were mistresses. The South China Morning Post reported that Ho also married his second wife, Lucina Laam King-ying (藍瓊纓), before Hong Kong’s polygamy laws changed in the early 1970s.
Nam is a defendant in the lawsuit along with Ho’s third “wife,” Ina Chan Un-chan (陳婉珍).
The feud shone a spotlight on apparent fissures among Ho’s myriad offspring, with the disputed share transfer giving the bulk of his fortune to his second and third families.
On Wednesday, Stanley and Clementina’s daughter Angela Ho Chiu-yin (何超賢) questioned whether her father really wanted to cut her and her two living siblings out of their inheritance.
“My father has always prided himself on being a fair, just and honest person and I cannot believe that may father would leave my mother’s family with nothing at all,” she said in a statement.
She said efforts to contact a trio of daughters from her father’s second and third families had failed, saying “they have ignored me.”
Angela Ho, who was expected to hold a press conference in Macau later yesterday, also said her mother’s connections were key to her father winning a gambling monopoly on Macau casinos starting from the 1960s until 2002.
Macau has boomed with about US$23.5 billion in gaming revenue last year — four times as much as the Las Vegas Strip.
Stanley Ho, once a keen ballroom dancer known for his playboy lifestyle, was hospitalized in mid-2009 for unspecified reasons.
Reports said he fell at home and suffered a brain injury, stoking questions about the future of his gambling empire. He has rarely been seen in public since falling ill, but the uncertainty appeared to have been settled on Monday when, in a file to Hong Kong’s stock exchange, his main company said he had offloaded the lion’s share of his Macau casino firm to relatives.
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