A local couple and two people originally from the mainland have been arrested for their alleged involvement in two sham marriages, Public Security Police (PSP) spokeswoman Cheong Im Sim said at a regular press conference yesterday.
The couple are a 65-year-old man surnamed Pun and a 63-year-old woman surnamed Ho. Both told the police they’re jobless. Cheong noted that Pun and Ho are in a de facto marriage without formal registration and have four children together. The two mainland suspects are a 53-year-old woman surnamed Xu and a 50-year-old man surnamed Lin. Xu works as a casino dealer while Lin is a construction worker.
According to Cheong, the four suspects entered into two separate marriages in order to help Xu and Lin obtain their local ID cards in 2002. Ho and Lin divorced in 2012, while Pun also helped Xu’s two sons to obtain local residency permits before divorcing in 2018. Cheong noted that Lin remarried his former spouse from the mainland and applied for her to settle in Macau.
The police received a report about the bogus marriages recently and summoned the quartet to a police station for questioning last week. The local couple confessed to the offence, claiming that they received a total of around 30,000 patacas for the bogus marriages. However, Xu and Lin denied the accusations.
The four suspects have been transferred to the Public Prosecutions Office (MP), facing charges of involvement in a sham marriage, Cheong said, adding that the police were still looking for the whereabouts of the possible intermediaries.
This chart provided by the Public Security Police yesterday shows the details of the sham marriage case involving four suspects and two bogus marriages.
