Courts | IPIM’s ‘secret criteria’ not so secret

Since at least 2015, the criteria used to evaluate residency applications for qualified technical staff at the Macao Trade and Investment Promotion Institute (IPIM) has been public and published on the bureau’s official website.
This fact was presented to the court yesterday by Álvaro Rodrigues, the defense lawyer of former IPIM president Jackson Chang. This was then confirmed by Hoi Man Kuong, a staff member for IPIM’s Residency Application and Legal Affairs Division.
“If it has been revealed already on the Internet, then it is not a secret anymore,” Hoi said, acknowledging Rodrigues’ question.
Before this was revealed, in response to questions from both the public prosecutor and the defense lawyers, Hoi confirmed on several occasions that the criteria used to evaluate applications was confidential and could not be disclosed by anyone working at IPIM.
Discussions about the confidentiality of IPIM’s criteria began earlier in the court session during the questioning of the witness by the prosecutor. While attempting to prove that the information was confidential, the public prosecutor showed the witness a report he had signed. It concerned an internal IPIM discussion about whether applicants should be informed of the criteria.
“We discussed this matter because there were some people that thought that IPIM was not transparent enough, and that by disclosing the criteria this would help. But most people [in IPIM] were favorable to the idea of not revealing the criteria,” Hoi explained. He noted that this was the opinion expressed in the report which was then sent to the Secretary of Economy and Finance.
This revelation was brought up again by Icília Berenguel, the defense lawyer representing Angela Ip, Chang’s wife. Berenguel asked the witness if the changes to the rules in June 2015, which were related to the evaluation of the application process, was intended “to tackle the critical voices” that accused IPIM of lacking transparency. Hoi affirmed that it was, noting that “it was one of the factors,” although he did not mention any others.
Berenguel continued to ask questions about this as she presented documents that were part of another court case. This case noted that there were differences between the information on IPIM’s website about factors that would be taken into account in the evaluation of an application. The website did not disclose the importance of each criterion, leading the defense lawyers to conclude that the confidential information only accessible to IPIM staff was the weighting of each criterion and not the criteria itself.
The witness did not want to comment on this conclusion, saying that he did not know and he had not participated in establishing the point system.
Following this, Pedro Leal, defense lawyer for former IPIM leader Glória Batalha Ung, linked this conclusion back to the testimony made by another former IPIM president, Irene Lau, on Tuesday. Leal asked the witness if he was aware that the government had placed particular importance on certain economic sectors, for example traditional Chinese medicine, and called on IPIM to prioritize attracting talents in these areas.
The witness said he was aware of this and that he also knew that the instructions came as a result of the policy address from the Chief Executive of that year.
“Yes, it was related to the policy address. We needed to have more people in this field [of traditional Chinese medicine],” Hoi said.
When asked who had informed him about this, Hoi said that it was the chief of the division, and that he was unaware of who had informed the chief.
Kuong Kuok On, Wu Sok Wah’s defense lawyer, noted that aside from the criteria being listed on the IPIM website, there was also an application that allowed candidates to simulate an application, with the claim that interested applicants could hear about their results without having to submit a formal application to IPIM.
Hoi replied that the online application would only give an approximate result, that it was not accurate and did not follow the complete evaluation conducted by IPIM staff, according to the documents submitted.
When asked about how much the results varied, Hoi said he could not answer this question as he was not very knowledgeable about the system.
The court session yesterday also contained a few tense moments.
At one point, one lawyer directly asked Hoi for his opinion on the work done by the IPIM leadership under Chang’s presidency. The witness admitted that he had some “divergent points of view” with the leadership.
The trial continues today with the hearings of more witnesses related to the case.