AL election | Coutinho apologizes for interference claim
Pereira Coutinho
Lawmaker José Pereira Coutinho has issued an apology to the Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government, after he accused the organization last month of providing discriminatory treatment to certain Legislative Assembly (AL) election candidates.
In the apology, printed in Macau’s two largest Chinese newspapers, Macau Daily News and Va Kio Daily, Coutinho described his accusation as being inappropriate and said that he had no evidence for the charges he made.
“First of all, please let me express my most sincere apologies related to the comments I made regarding the incident of the invitation of another Macanese group to the Liaison Office dinner,” it read.
“During the interview I made statements which were not based on facts regarding the invitation and the Liaison Office leaders. Besides that, the words I used were profoundly inappropriate and that has had negative repercussions in the Liaison Office, for which I apologize.”
“The Liaison Office has demonstrated its esteem for the Macanese community. It has contributed to the harmony of the local society. Its efforts are recognized by the Macau people, including the Macanese.”
Speaking last month as he formalized New Hope’s (Nova Esperança) candidacy to the AL elections, the lawmaker and candidate in the 2017 AL election accused the Liaison Office of interference in the election.
Coutinho said that the Liaison Office had organized a special dinner and invited members of the Macanese and Portuguese communities. He then accused officials from the Office of encouraging these attendees to vote for rival Macanese candidate Jorge Neto Valente.
Neto Valente, the son of the Macau lawyer of the same name, is running in the election as the third-place candidate on Melinda Chan’s list.
“I was very [disappointed] to realize that [such a dinner] was organized specifically in a way that [only] one of the candidates to the election could address the community,” said Coutinho last month. “When the Central Government pays for this, I consider that this is a serious matter because we see the infringement to the principle that elections must be fair.”
Coutinho added that he suspected local representatives of Beijing were supporting “these kinds of events in exchange for benefits when they leave [their posts].”
The Macanese legislator is the head of the New Hope political association as well as the Civil Servants Association. Despite having been directly elected to the AL in every election since 2005 and the fact that he will again stand first on the New Hope list this year, the lawmaker warned it would be difficult to electeven a single lawmaker in September.
“The lack of fairness is already affecting the [election] run,” he said at the time.
