Animal Farm | Why a slaughterhouse in Macau?

Albano Martins

A bull or a cow fled the Matadouro (Macao slaughterhouse) a few days ago. I would also have done the same.

What is the use of this company now in a small city like Macau, with no land and in a process of full integration into the Greater Bay Area?

I am not just talking about the welfare of the animals taken to the abattoirs, the conditions in which they are taken and the conditions in which they are dumped. I am not just talking about the animals that are there and being slaughtered with methods that are probably no longer used in any civilized country. I also talk about the public health issues that we need to be aware of, such as the spread of dangerous diseases from live animals coming from areas not controlled by our health authorities.

I also talk about the pollution of the surrounding waters, knowing that from this slaughterhouse all the waste is discharged directly to the surrounding waters, without any kind of treatment.

I also refer to the characteristics of that enterprise as it makes no sense that animals have to be slaughtered in Macao when their production is in China.

I also mention the huge space occupied by the facility that could be used for other community purposes in a heavily populated area with the highest population density in the world.

Has anyone done a cost-benefit analysis of this project? No, certainly not, because if so, it would ascertain who actually gains from that activity.

The government? No. The community? No.

If we are talking about meat, why doesn’t it come already chilled from China, which has space and lots of slaughterhouses.

The Macao slaughterhouse is a business that has consistently been characterized by substantial economic unfeasibility, with accumulated losses over the years of more than 20 million patacas.

The rule in the slaughterhouse is always or almost always the same: at the end of the year they have to deal with annual losses!

That is why the results carried over are brutally negative, already exceeding half of the capital stock!

Therefore, being a deficit activity, it obviously does not contribute to the public coffers, but on the contrary, it will continue to suck up money.

Where are our legislative members who speak about everything that they don’t know and nothing of what concerns us all?

Matadouro is a company which, in order to escape the provisions of the Commercial Code, and in view of the fact that its capital is being successively eaten into by the annual losses, engineers, where necessary, its accounting to hide the situation.

That is, it makes, when appropriate, successive revaluations of the assets, to hide a capital stock that is constantly being eaten into, which under Macao’s commercial law would require further capital reinforcement if the creative accounting were not authorized.

It did this in 2010 after finding that by the end of the previous year the capital had already been eaten into by more than half. It revalued the assets by MOP38,047,022, which was enough to bring its net worth from 19.5 million (below 40 million share capital) to over 56.6 million patacas.

Then last year (2018) it did the same engineering again. The revaluation was MOP50,446,254.00 but the losses remained at more than half the share capital. Now this ingenious exercise of artificial wealth creation has made its net worth soar to MOP70,277,670.00!

And who had led this organization in the last term of its Board of Directors? Imagine. The new Secretary for the Economy and Finance!

I now hope that with his in-depth knowledge of the reality of the slaughterhouse he will decide for the population and also for the animals, now that he has the power in his hands.