MGTO closes eight restaurants in Soho, five more to be closed

On the sidelines of the “Green Hotel Awards,” held yesterday at the World Trade Center, the director of the Macau Government Tourism Office (MGTO), Helena de Senna Fernandes, clarified that all eight restaurants that were closed by order of MGTO in the Soho space, in City of Dreams Macau, were due to a lack of licensing.

Senna Fernandes explained that the establishments opened in 2014 were without the proper licenses and “after acknowledging that we started the sanctioning process that resulted in the closure of the spaces.” Senna Fernandes explained that “documents that were missing in the processes of licensing had to do with works in the casino area, which have affected both Crown tower and Hard Rock Hotel.”

She also noted that currently there are another five sanctioning processes that are still running and “when concluded will all lead to the closure of the establishments.”

The MGTO director explained that “both processes [of licensing and sanctioning usually] run at the same time, ending usually either with the granting of the license for operation or in the cases that this is not possible, with the order of closure.”

Senna Fernandes has acknowledged that a similar situation has happened before in spaces like Broadway Macau in Galaxy but “currently it is all legal and all establishments have a proper license”.