Stanley Ho, a war-time refugee who built Macau's gambling industry

Casino tycoon Stanley Ho, whose business empire dominated the Portuguese gambling enclave of Macau for decades, has died in Hong Kong at age 98.To get more news about stanley ho children, you can visit shine news official website.

Considered the father of modern gambling in China, Ho began his long and eventful life as a kerosene trader and ended up Macau's richest person, a lavish spender and debonair ballroom dancer. A family statement said he died peacefully in his sleep, but did not give a cause of death.Tall, handsome and of mixed Chinese and European heritage, Ho fathered 17 children with four women, an extended family that engaged in high-profile squabbles over his legacy during his later years.

Ho had stakes in businesses running everything from the ferries and helicopters connecting Hong Kong and Macau to department stores, hotels, Macau's airport and its horse-racing tracks.Ho was born in 1921, into the Hotung family, one of Hong Kong's wealthiest and most powerful. When he was 13, his father abandoned the family after being wiped out by a stock market crash during the Great Depression. Ho's studies at Hong Kong University were interrupted by World War II.Fluent in English and Chinese, he was working as a telephone operator for British forces when the colony fell to Japan. He boarded a boat for neutral Macao, joining refugees from mainland China in the dying fishing port."I had to throw away my uniform and run to Macao as a refugee," Ho said in the 2001 interview.

During the war, Ho said he ran night-time smuggling and trading trips up the Pearl River Delta, on one occasion surviving a pirate attack. Eventually, he secured a four-decade monopoly on casinos in Macao, using that home advantage to build an empire that still dominated the industry for years after the local gaming market opened to foreign companies in 2002.Ho was low key and quietly spoken in person, but proud of his role in transforming Macao from a decaying backwater deluged with refugees into the glittering destination is it today.

Portugal transferred control of its colony Macao to China in 1999 and Ho's monopoly ended in 2002, as foreign rivals, including Las Vegas Sands Corp, Wynn Resorts Ltd and MGM Resorts International helped transformed Macao into a glitzy gambling powerhouse frequented by high-rolling mainland Chinese. Ho shrugged off allegations of ties to organised crime, such as a 2010 report by the New Jersey gaming commission that accused him of letting Chinese criminal gangs, or triads, prosper inside his casinos during the 1990s.