Pansy Ho: $4.4bn queen of sex, sequins and seven-card stud

The opening of a second giant gaming den will elevate Pansy Ho, the only woman ever to run a casino empire, from the richest woman in Hong Kong to one of the wealthiest businesswomen in Asia.

"In casinos, men run the show and women are just for show," says The Sunday Times. Except, that is, if you are Pansy Ho. The only woman ever to run a casino empire, "the $4.4bn queen of sex, sequins and seven-card stud" runs MGM Macau, a $1.25bn gambling palace and luxury hotel. The opening of a second giant gaming den will elevate her from being the richest woman in Hong Kong to becoming one of the wealthiest businesswomen in Asia.

Ho was born with "a silver gambling chip in her mouth". She is the daughter of tycoon Stanley Ho, who for 40 years enjoyed a monopoly on gambling in Macau. One of 17 children by his four wives, she "shot into the spotlight" in 2008 when she opened the MGM Grand mega-casino in partnership with the American giant MGM Mirage, says The New York Times. The suspicion then was that she was a "daddy's girl", catapulted into the hot seat because Stanley Ho's alleged links with organised crime made him too hot for MGM to handle (see box). But Pansy has proved a shrewd operator, staging a successful $1.5bn initial public offering in 2011 and driving ahead with ambitious plans to transform the family fiefdom in Macau. Her siblings don't appear to get a look in.

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