Stanley Ho, Macau gambling tycoon, 1921-2020

Stanley Ho, the legendary Macau gambling tycoon, has passed away at the age of 98, his family announced on Tuesday.

Ho dominated the former Portuguese colony’s gaming market for decades when it was a sleepy backwater overshadowed by nearby Hong Kong, and then successfully repositioned his business empire after the entrance of new concessionaires in 2001 quickly transformed Macau into the world’s largest gambling centre. He had been in poor health and out of the public eye for many years before his death.

A grandnephew of the Eurasian comprador Robert Hotung, Ho was born into one of Hong Kong’s most prominent families of the prewar era. But he made his own fortune and forged his formidable reputation in nearby Macau, where beginning in 1961 he was granted the monopoly over the then Portuguese colony’s gambling industry.

Ho’s death comes at a critical juncture for his family’s commercial empire and its flagship holding company, Sociedade de Turismo e Diversões de Macau, as it battles a host of keen competitors including companies owned by US tycoons Steve Wynn and Sheldon Adelson. All of Macau’s casino licences will be up for renewal in 2022.

His children Lawrence and Pansy also secured their own concessions with overseas partners when the market was liberalised, further cementing the Ho family’s dominance over the enclave.

Ho had at least 17 children by four wives over the years.

Stanley Ho with his daughter, Pansy Ho, at a ground breaking ceremony, in Macau 2005 © Dennis Owen/Bloomberg

In 2011, a public battle erupted between the families of Ho’s second and third wives who teamed up against his fourth wife, Angela Leong, over Ho’s empire including a 32 per cent stake in his Hong Kong-listed gaming vehicle, SJM Holdings.

The family battle was joined when one of his daughters, Daisy, was blocked by the SJM management from serving on the company’s board. Daisy is the daughter of Ho’s second wife, Lucina Laam.

SJM subsequently announced that Ms Leong, mother of Ho’s five youngest children, had been appointed managing director and had an 8 per cent stake in the company.

Depending on which wife’s home he happened to be in at the time, Ho was pushed around in a wheelchair for the TV cameras and made conflicting statements about what his intentions had been.

Angela Leong, Ho’s fourth wife and co-chairman and executive director of SJM Holdings © Bloomberg

After a few weeks of this serial drama playing out in the media, an agreement was reached between the two sides. With Ho’s death, the durability of the family’s settlement could be tested again.

Of Ho’s children, Pansy and Lawrence, also from his second marriage, have risen the highest. In addition to her Macau casino joint venture with MGM, Pansy Ho is an STDM director and also managing director of her father’s Hong Kong-listed arm, Shun Tak Holdings. STDM and Shun Tak have wide-ranging infrastructure, transport and property interests in Macau and Hong Kong.

Lawrence Ho is chairman and chief executive of Melco International Development, which runs three casinos in Macau.

Two fateful events defined Ho’s career. The first was the bankruptcy of his wealthy father after misguided share speculation. The shock of that event, Ho recalled in a February 2007 interview with a Macau magazine, transformed him from a ne’er-do-well student into a hardworking and ambitious young man on the make.

The second was the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong in 1941, after which he fled to Macau.

The Ho family-controlled Casino Lisboa in Macau © Bloomberg

As the colony of a neutral nation, Macau during the war years was a twilight zone of Portuguese and Macanese administrators, Chinese refugees and Japanese spies.

With little money but a wealth of family connections, the bilingual Ho thrived. In the interview, he recalled studying Japanese with an Imperial Army officer — a Colonel Sawa — and teaching him English in neighbouring Zhuhai; battling South China Sea pirates during trading runs to Free China; and, after the war, circumventing the UN’s Korean war blockade on communist China.

His exploits running the blockade made him a patriot in Beijing’s eyes — a reputation that he cherished. In 2007, Ho acquired a bronze horse head that had been looted from Beijing’s Summer Palace in 1860 by an Anglo-French invasion force. He later donated it to China’s cultural heritage administration.

Ho’s acquisition of Macau’s sole gaming licence in 1961, financed in part by fellow Hong Kong tycoon Henry Fok, set him on course to become one of Asia’s richest men. Fok, who passed away in 2006, and the late Cheng Yu-teng, another Hong Kong tycoon, were both major shareholders in STDM.