Monday, November 28, 2005

Stanley Ho Hung-sun is in the limelight in Hong Kong

The 85-year-old Macau casino tycoon, Stanley Ho Hung-sun(何鸿燊), who has been considered as a staunch partner of Chinese Communist Party, is in the limelight of Hong Kong media.
He placed ads on some presses to support government’s democratic proposal on his birthday. He also said that government would need to make concessions only if the turnout for the march exceeded 50,000(related story). That riled democratic camps, which sworn that they will by all means break that number to show HK people’s courage to the world.
Later on, he said a certain official of central government of China told him that universal suffrage in HK should be fulfilled step by step, and cited United States with 200-year history fulfills its universal suffrage only in its 180th year. He added the official said that if HK steadily demand the timetable of universal suffrage, what he only said is that it won’t be posterior to 2046 (Wong Kar-Wai’s hit movie in 2003) at latest definitely.
Almost at the same time, Mr. Ho’s sister placed ads to request Mr. Ho to pay off billions of HK dollars she should get. That’s part of the legend story about Mr. Ho’s family. Mr. Ho dismissed his 79-year-old sister last year from the post of director of his casino empire. Mrs. Ho wouldn’t rather step down, and has been fighting with his brother under the support of her son (another report), who was also dismissed from the top manager in Mr. Ho’s company.
Mr. Ho pledged a $500 million fund to our university (the University of Hong Kong) to celebrate its centenary in 2011 several weeks ago. Before that, Mr. Ho together with a woman (I didn’t recognize if she is Mr. Ho’s fourth wife or beloved daughter)showed up quickly in a donation ceremony our department organized (we got 1 million HK dollars donation from Shum Wai Yau, who was once a famous local journalist).
It seems that Mr. Ho is a very complex person from the aforementioned matters. What do you think?

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