Rear Window | Negative perfection

Severo Portela

The charges brought up against the former Prosecutor General Ho Chio Meng seem to substantially and formally have the potential, if not to dwarf, at least to equal in controversy and social alarm the uber case of jailed Secretary for Transport and Public Works. Ironically, Ho was then the PG who oversaw a trial of one hundred counts (Ao was found to be guilty on more than 40 counts of bribe-taking) and an outcome of 27 year incarceration plus the confiscation of HKD800 million.

The same court, the Court of Final Appeal – better known by its Portuguese acronym TUI – announced in mid-November that Ho is being charged with over 1,500 crimes or rather counts of crimes such as unlawful economic advantage (434), money laundering (56) plus 75 in complicit activities, 69 counts of abuse of power, forgery, and 19 counts of fraud involving large amounts of money. The list is long, long enough to mention one count of damaging public property. MOP44 million is the amount allegedly pocketed by Ho and culprits, amassed from a bulk of MOP160 million worth of public works contracts or procurement… all along, an apparently busy decade.

Over 1,500 crimes is something to shake the public (“si man”) into awe and disbelief, including none-other than the legal expert such as the president of the Lawyers Association. Valente described the irrational nature of the accusation as shocking such as may be considered a conspiracy theory, and pointed to the “great injustice” brought to the defendant´s lawyer who has only 20 days to read the case(s) – ten to thirty-thousand pages – and prepare a reply. We could mention other worrying quotes on the matter but our aim is truly to highlight the unusual statement that TUI issued to address “the concerns of some Macau lawyers” about the trial to begin early in December. It addresses in a refined manner the question of the pace, from detention on February 27 to the top court on December 5, and the question of the alleged lack of timely access to the case’s ten to thirty thousand pages, but does not justify the astonishing number of crimes much less the grounds of its complexity. Other than the thousand-page indictment on the many counts for which Ho Chio Meng will be on trial.

And that makes one shiver… until the TUI judgment is delivered to the public. Until then,  one not familiar with the Law will understandably wonder if distractedly taking a pair of socks is enough to face two counts of theft or one of stupidity, and apologies for the example chosen and the wry tone. And probably the doubts troubling the good judgment of the common people include the apparent trivialization of the serious crime of money laundering… ad lucem.

Perhaps, the MSAR system has to sail through troubled waters to be reinforced and to prevail. But nothing can prepare us to understand Secretary Chan’s mysterious decision to erase legislation already erased. It looks like a mere and unnecessary liquidation of the past.

Finally, a note on how Macau seems unprepared to evaluate the decision to interpret the Basic Law in order to draw a red line across Hong Kong’s highly charged politics. Scott Chiang thinks the decision to prevent localists Sixtus Leung and Yau Wai-ching to take their LegCo seats is proof enough that the breathing space for democracy is getting smaller and smaller: this way, ignoring that a red line is a frontier, not a sign unto scorched earth.

Macau seems happy to pretend that containing or scrapping democracy and restricting the concerns of the public to housing and transportation is the key to business as usual. It is not… Macau long knows how to live on “tableaux vivants” and has the human resources to cast suitably costumed actors carefully into such poses. The problem is the actors excel when the job is window dressing – “make something appear deceptively attractive or favorable” – but cannot cope when the job description looks like ‘dressage.’