Macau gambling king Stanley Ho has accused members of his family of robbing him of most of his multi-billion dollar fortune in a domestic feud that could complicate succession of the ailing tycoon's vast empire.
The 89-year-old billionaire has threatened to sue over the issue which has broader repercussions for Macau's casino industry.
Mr Ho, who built his $3.1 billion (€2.3 billion) empire from scratch, is no stranger to family disputes.
He has long been embroiled in a lawsuit with his sister Winnie over control of his assets, though Mr Ho managed to fend off this challenge to list his gambling flagship SJM (Sociedade de Jogos de Macau) Holdings in 2009.
The patriarch of an extended family of four wives and 17 known children is now claiming several key members of his clan - including two of his best known, Pansy and Lawrence, who both run major casinos - of restructuring and "fraudulently misappropriating" his core assets without his consent, leaving him with "almost nothing" .
Three other children from Mr Ho's second wife, as well as his third wife, are the major beneficiaries of the asset transfer.
In recent months, there were signs that Mr Ho was moving to divide his assets amongst his family, with the transfer of a notable stake in SJM to his fourth wife Angela Leong, a Macau legislator and senior executive in Mr Ho's operations whom some analysts see as an heir apparent.
Speculation has swirled over who would succeed to Mr Ho's empire since 2009 when the once spry octogenarian's health deteriorated following brain surgery.
Among his daughters, Josie has forged a career as an Asian film star known for risqué roles, while Pansy helps run part of Mr Ho's corporate empire and Macau's MGM Grand, and is considered one of Asia's leading businesswomen.
Son Lawrence runs Melco Crown Entertainment 's City of Dreams mega casino, a joint venture with Australia's Crown Ltd headed by James Packer.
The former Portuguese colony's transformation from a seedy gambling haven into a Las Vegas-style entertainment paradise since 2002 has meant stiff competition for Mr Ho. He still controls one of six gaming licences in Macau with SJM dominating around a third of Macau's overall market share.
The elder Ho's casinos extend across the Pacific Rim and include those in fringe markets like North Korea and Vietnam.
The tycoon shuttles between Hong Kong and Macau by helicopter or on one of his high-speed jetfoils, while overseeing a far-flung business empire that includes banking, broadcasting, air services and a horse racing monopoly in Macau.
Besides the roulette wheels and slot machines that made his fortune, Mr Ho also runs luxury hotels around Asia as well as plane, ferry and helicopter services and major real estate projects.
His Hong Kong-listed conglomerate, Shun Tak Holdings Ltd HK, boasts the world's largest jetfoil fleet, carrying visitors between Hong Kong and Macau, an hour's voyage apart.
Well into his 80s, the dapper Mr Ho loved to play tennis and ballroom dancing - his fourth wife was a dance teacher - courting the limelight with his jet-setting lifestyle tracked as closely as Asia's movie stars.
Born in Hong Kong in 1921 and rumoured to be one-eighth Irish he is related to the famed and wealthy Ho Tung family of Chinese and European descent, Mr Ho's privileged upbringing was short-lived. At 13, his father lost everything in the stock market and fled to Vietnam, abandoning his wife and children.
Mr Ho was determined to succeed and earned a place at the University of Hong Kong. Though the second World War intervened, Mr Ho's luck held. He left school and worked for seven days for the Air Raid Service Department before the Japanese captured Hong Kong.
"I earned HK$10 (€0.95) out of the seven days ... then I went to Macau," he once said in an interview.
"I was a very poor man," he said. "I started with only HK$10. That was my capital." He got a job with the Macau government, bartering goods with the Japanese. The experience led to his own trading company and he became a millionaire.
In the early 1960s, he bid for the Macau gaming monopoly being offered by the Portuguese in the largely forgotten Asian outpost.
Ho won the concession, built a new harbour, added high-speed boats to lure Hong Kong's avid gamblers and created the cash cow that made his Asian empire possible.
Ironically, the casino king doesn't gamble.
"I have always told my children and my good friends: 'For God's sake, never gamble heavily and if you can avoid it, don't ever gamble'," he told the Far Eastern Economic Review in 1999.
Reuters