The 66-year-old male owner of a local transport company was arrested on Thursday for cheating the government’s tipping fee exemption scheme out of 2.9 million patacas, Judiciary Police (PJ) spokesman Lou Chan Fai said during a regular press conference on Friday.
A tipping fee is a charge to be paid by those who dispose of waste in a landfill that is based on the weight of waste per tonne.
According to Lou, the local suspect is surnamed Ng.
Lou said that the Judiciary Police were notified by the Public Prosecutions Office (MP) on March 9 last year that Ng had applied to the Environmental Protection Bureau (DSPA) on December 28, 2020 for exemption of the construction waste tipping fees for a certain site in the Zone A land reclamation area. After the application was approved, DSPA staff installed an access control system at the site’s entrance for Ng’s drivers to tap their cards every time they transported construction debris from the site to a landfill in Taipa, so that Ng’s company would be exempted from the tipping fees, Lou added.
In November 2021, thanks to the site’s CCTV footage, DSPA staff discovered that vehicles from another construction site used the access control system to avoid their tipping fees, involving unpaid fees of about 2.9 million patacas, according to Lou.
During the investigation, Lou pointed out, the Judiciary Police discovered that the moving of debris from both construction sites was handled by Ng’s company, adding that during the period from November to December 2021, a total of 15,000 tonnes of inert waste such as sea mud and steel was treated as waste from the site exempted from the tipping fees, and transported to the landfill.
Calculated by weight, the tipping fees in Ng’s case ranged from 800 to 3,000 patacas each time.
Lou said Ng was summoned to the PJ station in Zape for questioning on Thursday, during which Ng denied committing the offence and refused to assist the police in their investigations. However, Lou added, based on the investigations, the Judiciary Police assume that Ng was involved in the case.
The case has been transferred to the Public Prosecutions Office, where Ng faces a fraud charge, involving a considerably large amount of money.
