HONG KONG: The very public battle over the $3-billion fortune of wheelchair-bound Stanley Ho makes for captivating viewing likely to be played out many times over as a rash of Asian tycoons reach old age.
Having dominated newspaper front pages in Macau and neighbouring Hong Kong for weeks, the Ho case highlights how Asia's myriad family empires are at risk of bruising succession and inheritance brawls, observers say.
Ho, 89, a legendary playboy who transformed Macau from a sleepy Portuguese colony into a gaming hub worth more than the Las Vegas Strip, is just the latest self-made billionaire to see a divided family fight over a vast empire.
"All of these family disputes involve a patriarch of a certain age," said Jonathan Mok, a partner at blue chip firm Mayer Brown JSM.
"That is why you now see the second generation going to court, and I think you're going to see more and more litigation."
Family spats have broken out across Asia in recent times, from a fight in Taiwan over the estate of late tycoon Wang Yung-ching to a power struggle between the heirs to Reliance Industries, India's largest private firm.
Many older tycoons, particularly wealthy Chinese in Hong Kong and Macau, have traditionally shied away from wills over fears they are a bad omen, a move that sets up the potential for family meltdowns once the patriarch dies.
The stakes are especially high in Hong Kong, where the city's 40 richest hold on to fortunes worth about $163 billion, a unique concentration of wealth encompassing everything from supermarkets and property to ports and telecoms.
Another succession pitfall is that tycoons often seem to wait until late in life to divvy up their empires, such as the octogenarian Ho, nicknamed "The King of Gambling".
"They will try to manipulate not only their business but also their family to put themselves at the centre and have a final say in their legacy," said Victor Zheng, an assistant professor at Hong Kong University.
"They founded the whole enterprise and enjoy their power and prestige within the family," added Zheng, author of a book on the Chinese inheritance system.
The Ho family travails have shone an unflattering spotlight on his giant clan, 17 children born to four women, some of whom he has accused of trying to steal his flagship SJM Holdings.
The drama has seen Ho flip flop on accusations that his second and third families tried to nab his empire. He cancelled his first lawsuit after a bizarre TV appearance in which the frail tycoon, surrounded by relatives he was suing, struggled to read a giant cue card to say the spat was resolved.
He later claimed to have been coerced, filing a new court claim.
"Frankly, we will never know the real truth of what is going on," said Joe Studwell, whose book "Asian Godfathers: Money and Power in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia" takes an inside look at the region's super-rich.
"But some of the kids have the reputation of being distinctly damaged goods, and who knows what they are capable of," he added.
Pansy and Lawrence, two of Ho's children from his second marriage, run rival gambling concessions in Macau, while Pansy and some of the tycoon's other daughters also hold senior positions at Ho's Shun Tak Holdings conglomerate.
But there is little guarantee that most tycoons' offspring will have the interest or ability to run the family firm, with less than 20 percent of first-generation companies surviving by the third generation.
And while more than half of Ho's offspring are female, most Asian business empires are handed to male heirs, likely the case for Richard and Victor Li, whose billionaire father Li Ka-shing is one of the world's richest men.
"Very, very occasionally a girl might be chosen over a boy if that boy is particularly incompetent," Studwell said.
A "sizeable number" of Asian tycoons have multiple offspring with numerous mistresses or concubines, said Mayer Brown JSM's Mok, muddying the waters further.
"Because of Ho's wealth and the large number of offspring there is going to be conflict in his family," added Zheng.
Concubines, mistresses traditionally brought into the home of a married man after a ceremony, have long been a part of Chinese history.
China's Communist government banned the practice in the mid-20th Century with Hong Kong, then a British colony, following suit in 1971.
"After 1971, concubines could only be seen as mistresses in Hong Kong, in law they can't be entitled to anything."
"Their rights are inferior even to the children.”
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