Macau’s Court of Second Instance ruled on Friday that Hong Kong businessmen Joseph Lau Luen Hung (pictured) and Steven Lo Kit Sing’s grounds of appeal against them having been found guilty of bribery and money laundering had failed. Both were sentenced in March last year by the Court of First Instance to five years and three months in jail. Both had been accused of paying a bribe of HK$20 million to the former Secretary of Public Works Ao Man Long to help secure five parcels of land opposite Macau International Airport for the development of luxury residential project La Scala. The land deal was declared void by the Macau Government in 2013 – and it was ruled by the Court of Second Instance last month that these five plots should be returned to the Macau Government’s possession. Following the Court of First Instance’s ruling in March last year, Lau lodged an appeal against the court having rejected his request to investigate the sales plan of the five plots and the context for it. Lau wanted to prove that the local property sector had already been aware of the intended sales of the five plots prior to 2004, which did not make him and his company drafting the development plan of the five plots starting from February 2005 unreasonable – or that Lau’s development plan was necessarily related to Ao. But Lau’s grounds of appeal were rejected by the Court of Second Instance. ‘This does not overturn the fact that the former Secretary [Ao Man Long] had used his authority to interfere in the sales of the five plots of land in the case, nor is this sufficient proof that the appellant is not guilty,’ the verdict of the Court of Second Instance reads. The verdict also noted that the historical sales record of the five plots and how the previous owners handled them (prior to Lau’s Moon Ocean company’s acquiring the land in 2006) was unrelated to the case. In 2006, Moon Ocean, the company controlled by Joseph Lau, acquired the five plots of land for MOP1.3 billion. Five years later, Moon Ocean paid an additional MOP642 million after the contract was revised at a time when Macau authorities were already investigating the operation. Lau’s appeal to prove the handwriting in the ‘Friendship Notebook’ – the document that allegedly shows payoffs to Ao – was also rejected by the Court of Second Instance. The validity of the ‘notebook’, also a key exhibit of evidence in Ao’s corruption case processed by the Court of Final Appeal, has already been proved in terms of evidence in Ao’s case, the Court of Second Instance stated in the verdict. In the same verdict, the Court of Second Instance also turned down Lau’s request for a lighter penalty, saying that the ruling of 5 years and three months of imprisonment is already the ‘lightest possible’ considering the nature of the crime, and Lau’s unco-operative attitude in the processing of the case as he was absent from the trials. The verdict released on Friday also included the court’s rejection of Steven Lo’s appeal that his document read by a Commission Against Corruption (CCAC) officer in a trial held in 2013 was presented as inferential evidence. According to the Penal Code, for cases that the Court of Second Instance has affirmed the original judgment of the lower court that involves imprisonment of less than 10 years, an appeal may not be made to the Court of Final Appeal.
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