| By Angela Mackay, Sunday Business, London
Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News Dec. 16--Hong Kong's legendary Stanley Ho is set to lose his 40-year monopoly over the world's richest casino franchise if several foreign competitors, including Aspinall's of the UK, have their way. Macau, the former Portuguese enclave close to Hong Kong which was returned to Beijing two years ago, is auctioning three casino licences in a move that has attracted operators from all over the world eager for a part of the only legal casino business within China's borders. The winners will know before Christmas. Last week, 21 companies -- including Aspinall's, MGM Mirage of Las Vegas and a consortium involving Ho as well as several local companies -- submitted tenders for licences, although President Jiang Zemin specifically banned bidders from mainland China. Even though the 80-year-old Ho is expected to be granted one of the
three licences, the government hopes the move will transform Macau's lucrative
but seedy casino business into something resembling Las Vegas, which has
developed a plethora of family-orientated entertainment and gambling venues.
Unusually, Ho, whose many businesses in the former Portuguese colony generate more than half the revenues of the Macau government and whose fortune is said by Forbes magazine to be more than $1.5 billion, does not seem worried. A few months ago he said that he believed Macau's chief executive, Edmund Ho (no relation), had reserved a licence for him. "I am the king of gambling," he said. "How can the king of gambling lose his bid for a licence in Macau?" Yet when the chief executive objected to these comments (the tender process had not even begun at that stage), the canny businessman retracted his statement, claiming that he had made the observation after long hours standing in the sun for the christening of a tugboat. One of Hong Kong's more colourful and controversial figures, Stanley Ho was the son of a European merchant and his Chinese wife. His wealthy family lost their fortune in the stock-market crash of the 1930s and Ho later fled Hong Kong for Macau when it surrendered to the Japanese in 1941. Shortly after, he negotiated a groundbreaking trading monopoly between Macau and the still Japanese-occupied Hong Kong and made his first UKpound 1 million before the age of 20. In 1962, with several Hong Kong businessmen, he bid a hefty $400,000 for the right to run the casino business in Macau. He went on to build casinos and hotels in Macau and started the jetfoil from Hong Kong, which provides his biggest source of gamblers. A ladies' man by reputation, Ho is well-known in Hong Kong for his four "wives" and his ballroom dancing. His latest wife, who is almost half his age, met Ho while she was working as a dancer in Macau. Ho, who is often called Dr Ho as a result of an honorary degree, is known to have fathered at least 17 children, although none has emerged as a clear successor to take over his businesses. A long-time visitor to Australia, he had hoped to break into the casino business there. He was a member of the Hudson Conway consortium which won the Crown casino tender in Melbourne but was forced to relinquish his stake when he was found, during the tender process for Sydney's Darling Harbour casino, to be an unsuitable person to hold a casino licence. A 1992 US senate committee report on organised crime in Asia found that, while Ho was "not known to be involved in organised crime", he still had "some connection with organised crime figures". Ho denies the allegation. -----To see more of Sunday Business, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.sundaybusiness.co.uk UKpound preceding a numeral refers to the United Kingdom's pound sterling. (c) 2001, Sunday Business, London. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News. |
