Breaking | Macau rocked as former top prosecutor held over multi-million dollar corruption racket

Macau’s former top prosecutor has been arrested over a suspected multi-milion dollar corruption racket involving kickbacks for lucrative public works contacts.

Anti-corruption agents in the former Portuguese enclave picked up Ho Chio-meng – who was once tipped as a possible chief executive for the city – Saturday night as he tried to board a ferry to Hong Kong.

The former senior official – who is also a former senior official of Macau’s Commission Against Corruption – was last night behind bars in Coloane Prison accused, along with an undisclosed number of former prosecutions office colleagues, of pocketing kickbacks of $44 million patacas (HK$42.7 million) from public works contracts worth a total of HK$162 million.

Macau’s Commission Against Corruption confirmed a probe is underway into “a former leader” of the public prosecutions office, the second most senior official ever to face graft allegations in the city that went from sleepy backwater to the world’s richest gaming destination in just over a decade.

Ho was chief prosecutor between the 1999 handover and 2014, when he was replaced in a wholesale shake-up of the Macau government’s ruling cabinet, which coincided with a major ratcheting up of President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on corruption targeting the city.

The commission said it received a complaint last year and began an investigation into a number of top former public prosecutions officials.

A statement released late last night said “various coercive measures” were applied to some of the suspects.