Macau businessman Liu Haigui was yesterday sentenced in absentia to 18 years behind bars for defrauding The Macau Chinese Bank (MCB) out of about 456 million patacas, but all the other 14 defendants in the case were acquitted, including the bank’s former president Yau Wai Chu, according to reports by local journalists who attended the sentencing.
Five defendants who had been remanded in custody for about a year, including businesswoman and newspaper publisher Bobo Ng Son Po, were released from detention yesterday.
The Court of First Instance (TJB) ruled that, with the exception of Liu, the Public Prosecution’s bank loan fraud allegations concerning the defendants could not be proved, because of which they were acquitted of all charges which included organised crime, forgery and fraud.
In the wake of his prison sentence, an arrest warrant for Liu has been issued.
The defendants included five former employees of the bank.
According to a statement by the Court of Final Appeal, which oversees Macau’s lower courts, the case involved multiple “complex bank loan frauds” by Liu who presented forged documents and false construction project contracts to the bank to obtain the loans.
The statement did not identify any of the defendants, merely referring to them as, for instance, “No.6 defendant” or “businessman A”. It identified the bank’s former executives who stood trial as “No.1 to No.5 defendants”.
All of the defendants, including Liu, were acquitted of their organised crime charges. Liu, which the statement referred to as “No.6 defendant”, committed 13 crimes of fraud involving “considerably high amounts of money” and three crimes of using false documents, the statement said.
It was not immediately known whether the Public Prosecution (MP) plans to appeal.
This image uploaded from the homepage of The Macau Chinese Bank (MCB) shows some of its facilities.
