Plan B Forum

One of Hong Kong's richest men has offered a reward of nearly £40 million ($62.2 million) to the man who can woo his lesbian daughter.



Cecil Chao Sze-tsung, a property magnate, announced the HK$500 million bounty this week after reports that his daughter Gigi Chao, 33, a University of Manchester graduate, married her long-term girlfriend in France.


"I don't mind whether he is rich or poor", Mr Chao said, "the important thing is that he is generous and kind-hearted".

Mr Chao also told the South China Morning Post that reports of his daughter's marriage were "false".


The tycoon said he hoped to help the successful suitor to start a business. The reward was "an inducement to attract someone who has the talent but not the capital to start his own business".

"Gigi is a very good woman with both talents and looks," the doting father said. "She is devoted to her parents, is generous and does volunteer work."

It was reported that Miss Chao married Sean Yeung, her girlfriend of seven years, who also uses the name Sean Eav, in France on April 4.

A photograph on Miss Chao's Facebook page confirmed that she and her girlfriend flew to France two days earlier. "Going to Paris to buy a few businesses," read the caption to a picture apparently taken in the first class section of a plane.

The Facebook profile of Miss Chao, an architecture graduate, reads: "Helicopter pilot. Social entrepreneur. Creator of expressions in colour and emotion." It also describes her as an executive director at her father's Hong Kong-based property firm, Cheuk Nang.

A Hong Kong billionaire's daughter has been bombarded with marriage proposals, and even nude photographs, from as far afield as Oklahoma, Nigeria and Bulgaria after her father offered £40 million ($62.2 million) to the man who could woo her.

Speaking yesterday Miss Chao, 33, said she had received about 200 proposals and that the number following her on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook had jumped by 1500 since her father's announcement.

"It's ridiculous. I can't sort out the serious proposals from the half-hearted ones. I can't make head or tail of it," she said.

Miss Chao, an executive director of her father's company, Cheuk Nang, said they included gentlemen who said they were looking for love and asked her out on a date, as well as some less conventional introductions. Some have attached nude photos of themselves or provided information about their finances.

"Some of them had obviously done their research, you know, gone on my Facebook and looked at my background," she said. "Some of them are quite poetic."

But far from feeling angry at her father, she said she was "touched".

"At first I was entertained by it, and then that entertainment turned into the realisation and conviction that I am a really lucky girl to have such a loving daddy, because it's really sweet of him to do something like this," she said. She knew that her father would go public to deny the union, but did not know he would offer the reward. "I think the 500 million dollars really came as an afterthought."

Miss Chao said that she loved her father and they had a good relationship. "It's not that he can't accept me," she said. "It's that he can't accept how society would view me and the status that it would incur. Marriage is still a form of social status. I do understand him. I understand why he's doing this.

"But I don't appreciate getting 1500 emails."

Miss Chao, who also runs a model management and PR firm, met her partner, Sean Yeung, while they were working together.

Miss Chao, who has dated men and women, said she had always been open and honest about her relationships to her family. But when she told her mother about a relationship with a girl when she was 16, her mother "banged her head against the wall, literally". Members of the homosexual and lesbian community in Hong Kong are not widely accepted.

Mr Chao is somewhat unconventional himself. He made headlines in 2003 when his Rolls-Royce caught fire while he and his girlfriend were inside.

The tycoon has never married and once claimed to have had "intimate relations" with about 10,000 women.


Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/daughter-to ... z27jLUiOgO

"I can't make head or tail of it," she said.