Sacked cultural fund member’s relative among beneficiaries

Leong Heng Teng

Only 73 out of the total 86 applicants eligible for the Cultural and Creative Industries Fund last year were entitled to the official subsidy. While the overall amount of the fund is approximately MOP100 million, individual grants vary between MOP40,000 and more than MOP8 million.
A company owned by a relative of a dismissed executive member of the fund, Chao Son U, was also among the fund recipients.
During a media conference held yesterday, the official results were released. Leong Heng Teng, the president of the administrative committee responsible for managing the fund, clarified that the authorities’ final decision on allocating the subsidies was legitimate, in spite of public concerns over the standards of the project review process undertaken by the committee.
“All our examinations, approvals and deals are made according to the existing laws and regulations. The incident, I believe, has been clarified after [CCAC’s] probe result,” he explained. “Actually, all the projects [were approved] through legal procedures. We treated every single case without discrimination in the reviews.”
Nonetheless, Leong refused to identify the company in connection to the disgraced official on the list of fund receivers, saying that he would not comment on inquiries related to “individuals.”
The administrative committee had revealed that thirteen subsidy qualifiers might have yielded their entitlements due to personal reasons, as some of them found the conditions and terms outlined in the contracts unfavorable to their projects. Currently, only half of them have officially announced their refusals for the funds to be granted.
Currently, only 50 project owners have officially expressed their willingness to take the grant. Of the seven platform-providing grantees willing to open a total of 110 long-term workspaces to the public in the future, a center to promote local brands (澳門原創品牌孵化中心有限公司) and a center for integrated cultural and creative services (澳門文創綜合服務中心有限公司) received the highest amounts of funding: close to MOP9 million and around MOP8.3 million respectively. These two  projects aimed to foster the local creative scene.
On the other hand, it was reported that another 66 firms, which were to receive their individual amounts in annual instalments, had an average business operation length of 5.88 years. The highest subsidy amount, totaling around MOP3 million, was allocated to the Equipment Company Master (萬訊行綜合設備有限公司).
Aside from individual subsidies, the government also granted interest-free loans to four local companies through the fund, three of which obtained an average amount of around MOP5 million.
Among the four categories highlighted in the government’s initiative, the committee’s statistics indicate that the area of art colection has the fewest projects, accounting for four percent of the entire cultural and creative sector.
Regardless of the industries of the recipients, the committee authorities claimed that all of them had a “broader vision” and “clear goals” in developing their businesses, which made them “potential enterprises.” Staff reporter