A beauty parlour owner (referred to as A), who used someone else’s ID card (referred to as B) to apply for an extra non-resident worker (NRW) quota from the government, was sentenced to a year and three months behind bars, the Court of Final Appeal (TUI) said in a statement yesterday.
The statement did not reveal the genders of A and B.
According to the statement, in order to fraudulently apply for the extra NRW for A’s beauty parlour, he or she used B’s Macau ID without his or her knowledge and lied to the government that B worked at A’s company. The statement said that in the span of six years (2012-2018), A regularly handed in B’s ID data to the Finance Services Bureau (DSF), Social Welfare Bureau (IAS), Labour Affairs Bureau (DSAL) and other government entities. The statement underlined that B was never, in any way, employed by A.
The statement said that B discovered the incident when he or she received a letter from the government asking for personal income tax payment. The statement pointed out that, therefore, A was charged with six cases of document forgery, five of which were for continuous offences. The statement pointed out that the Court of First Instance (TBJ) fined A 36,000 patacas for three continuous document forgery offences.
The statement said that the Public Prosecutions Office (MP) was not satisfied with the ruling and appealed to the Court of Second Instance (TSI) as it considered the penalty to be too lenient.
The statement said that the TSI panel of judges argued that the reasons for the Court of First Instance’s ruling was because A was a first-time offender and was honest about his or her offences. However, the statement added, A only confessed after B reported the matter to the police, therefore it was not a valid reason for a lesser punishment. The statement said that the TSI panel also considered that A used B’s ID data on multiple occasions which severely affected the rights of local workers, adding that consequently only fining A was an insufficient penalty.
The statement underlined that the lenient punishment could send a wrong message to the public, as they would think that document forgery is not a serious crime. The statement said that consequently the panel decided to give A a harsher punishment.
The statement said that the panel ruled that A was to be sentenced to a total of one year and three months behind the bars with two years’ probation, adding that A would only receive probation if he or she “donated” 36,000 patacas to the government.
