"Thanks partly to our relatively recent industrial emergence, most of the local companies are still in family control, not widely held, so we have a greater share of succession issues," said David Webb, a shareholder activist who runs the Hong Kong corporate governance watchdog. Principally at stake is his $1.6 billion interest in Hong Kong-listed casino operator Sociedade de Jogos de Macau, known as SJM. The rival branches of the billionaire's family are now publicly feuding over control of his casinos and a collection of businesses that run everything from the ferries connecting Hong Kong and Macau to department stores, hotels, Macau's airport and its horse- and dog-racing tracks. Ho reportedly met Chan, who was a nurse, when she was hired to take care of an ailing Leitao. Ho has fathered children with two other women, Ina Chan and Angela Leong, whom he refers to as his "wives," though he is not legally married to either.
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Around the same time, Ho married Lucina Laam under a Qing dynasty code which allowed men to take multiple wives. Her father was a prominent lawyer in Macau, and her connections to Portugal and to Macau high society helped Ho and his partners win the casino monopoly in 1962.
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Key to Ho's gambling success was his now-deceased first wife, Clementina Leitao, whom he wed in 1948. Last year, gambling revenues surged to a record $23.5 billion. Macau reverted to Chinese sovereignty in 1999, and the government ended Ho's monopoly in 2002 to boost the economy.
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The enclave grew from a seedy, colonial outpost administered by corrupt Portuguese administrators into a modern, Chinese-run gambling powerhouse that has overtaken Las Vegas. Though his illnesses have left him a facsimile of his former flamboyant self, Ho's business rise has paralleled the fortunes of Macau. Ho once had a monopoly on Macau's casinos but now his business interests, which are listed on the stock exchange of neighboring Hong Kong, vie against giants like Las Vegas Sands Corp. In Ho's case, there is a lot to fight over: his personal wealth of $3.1 billion, according to Forbes magazine, and the lion's share of the Macau gambling industry - the world's biggest.