A senior staff member of a local resort’s stewarding department, whose tasks included staff recruitment, has been found to have hired at least nine mainlanders as stewards without going through the resort’s formal hiring process after receiving bribes totalling around 190,000 yuan from them, the Commission Against Corruption (CCAC) announced in a statement yesterday.
The statement did not mention whether the senior staff member has been dismissed. Neither did it reveal the name of the integrated resort and its location.
According to the statement, a resident reported to the anti-graft body that a number of the resort’s stewards had told him or her that all of them paid “recommendation fees” so that they were hired, because of which it launched an investigation into the case.
The findings of the CCAC investigation showed that since last year, the senior staff member, in cahoots with his cohabiting girlfriend and a middleman, had been looking for mainlanders keen to work in Macau, telling them that they could be directly hired by a company here without having to go through a job interview, after simply paying a “recommendation fee”.
According to the statement, the senior staff member used his power to help at least nine mainlanders get a job in his department, with each of them having paid a bribe ranging between 15,000 yuan and 25,000 yuan.
CCAC investigators also found that most of those who had paid the senior staff member a bribe were immediately hired without a job interview, some of whom even failed to meet their position’s minimum academic qualification requirements as they were illiterate
The statement said that the senior staff member destroyed evidence in an attempt to hide the fact that he had solicited job “recommendation fees” and told others involved in the case to hide the fact.
The case has been transferred to the Public Prosecutions Office (MP) for further investigation. According to the statement, the senior staff member, his girlfriend and the middleman face bribe-taking charges, while the nine mainlanders who were hired after paying the “recommendation fee” face charges of paying bribes, listed by Macau’s law on private sector bribery, officially known as Law 19/2009 on the Prevention and Suppression of Bribery in the Private Sector.
Second similar case
Yesterday’s statement pointed out that the case is the second private-sector bribery case detected by CCAC investigators in recent weeks, adding that companies or other private organisations should report to the anti-graft body should they discover bribe-taking and bribe-giving by their staff members.
The case announced yesterday came after a case announced in late May where an executive chef of a gaming operator’s food and beverage department had been found to have told several of his subordinates to give him money every month between September 2020 and February 2023 in return for ensuring their job contract renewals. The chef solicited bribes totalling 240,000 patacas during the period.
This undated handout photo taken from the Commission Against Corruption’s (CCAC) website shows its branch office in Taipa, located on the ground floor of Block 4 of the Nova City residential estate.
