Ho Chio Meng denies wrongdoing in luxury office rental

Ho Chio Meng

The trial of former Prosecutor General Ho Chio Meng started last Friday morning, although it had initially been scheduled for last Monday.

Sam Hou Fai, the president of the Court of Final Appeal of Macau (TUI), together with judge Song Man Lei, spent more than three hours reading the indictment against Ho.

Ho has been accused of hundreds of crimes, including the establishment of a crime syndicate, money laundering, abuse of power, and fraud involving large sums of money.

According to the indictment, Ho has, in the past 16 years, created 10 shelf companies with his brother and brothers-in-law, among others.

These companies took on contracts outsourced by the Public Prosecutions Office (MP), such as maintenance and cleaning services. Ho was addressed as the “leader” of these companies, which did not run any other actual businesses and charged service prices that were around 8 to 50 percent higher than the market rate.

The indictment says that Ho abused his position at the MP to outsource contracts to these companies.

Between 2006 and 2014, Ho, under the name of the MP, allegedly instructed a former department head at the office to rent a workplace at the Hotline Center’s entire 16th floor.

Ho claimed that the rental should be maintained confidentially. However, this new office was never used for any public services operated by the MP, and members of the staff of the office were unaware of its existence.

Inside the workplace, there was allegedly a big TV, karaoke machine, a sauna and massage facilities. Its rent over the years amounted to more than MOP7 million.

On Friday afternoon, Ho denied the fact that the office was never used for public services, and claimed that the office was used to host prosecutors from Guangdong province, Hong Kong and from the Supreme People’s Procuratorate of China.

Regarding the rental, Ho admitted that he had not read documents on the subject and had always forwarded bureaucratic notices to his subordinates.

In 2013, the Macao Customs Service seized some agilawood. Because the case was not qualified to be forwarded to the Prosecutions Office, the Customs Service did not deliver the agilawood to the Prosecutions Office.

However, Ho had the seized wood sent to his office at the Hotline Center, where he used some of it as decoration.

Ho was also accused of 56 instances of money laundering, and was reportedly found with more than MOP10 million in savings accounts in mainland China and Macau. He had not declared these assets to the related authorities. 

The indictment also states that Ho asked a former director at the MP to withdraw more than MOP5.6 million from a special fund of the department and transfer the money to him.

However, this transfer had not been approved by the Chief Executive and no receipts were produced. Julie Zhu