Father offers £78m to man who can wed his lesbian daughter

AS wedding presents go it's rather more attractive than a sandwich maker. A Hong Kong property magnate is offering £78m to the man who marries his daughter, Gigi Chao.

The catch – and there had to be a catch given the amount of money involved – is that Gigi is a lesbian who has no intention of getting hitched to a man.

Cecil Chao first offered a bounty to the man who could successfully walk his gay daughter down the aisle in September 2012. The payment – originally set at a paltry £40 million – horrified gay and lesbian organisations in Asia and attracted "international opprobrium".

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Undeterred, 77-year-old Chao doubled his offer this week. The businessman, described by The Times as a "bon vivant helicopter pilot and a self-confessed bedder of more than 10,000 women", is upset that his original dowry had achieved nothing.

"I would be happy to pay twice as much money to any many who can successfully court Gigi," he told reporters, adding that "her thinking will change in the future".

Chao insists he doesn't want to meddle in his daughter's private life – despite his massive cash inducements to male suitors. He merely wants to "coax her towards a husband, children and a more traditional family structure for when she eventually inherits the Cheuk Nang property empire," the Times reports.

The billionaire argues that his 33-year-old daughter is too young to have cemented her sexual preferences.

Then again, Chao's extraordinary ability to deny the apparently obvious is a matter of record. In 2012, he said his daughter wasn't a lesbian despite the fact she had been in a relationship with a woman for nine years and had recently formalised the union with a ceremony in Paris.

What does Gigi Chao make of her father's efforts to make her change sides? She is, in a word, disgusted.

She told the Times she had received a "vomit-making" deluge of photographs showing potential husbands in various states of undress. She added: "I don't think my dad's offering of any amount of money would be able to attract a man I would find attractive."