Six suspects who allegedly ran a prostitution ring involving 96 sex workers in one of the city’s best known hotels were taken to the Public Prosecution Office (MP) for questioning Monday morning, one day after the Judiciary Police (PJ) announced their arrests.
On Monday, government-broadcaster TDM identified the crime scene in question as Hotel Lisboa and the main suspect as Alan Ho Yau Lun, a nephew of gaming mogul Stanley Ho Hung Sun.
Ho is a member of the Macau Hoteliers and Innkeepers Association and Macau Tourist Agents Association. He was awarded the Tourism Merit Medal in 2011 by the local government for his contribution to Macau’s tourism industry.
On Sunday, the Judiciary Police announced at a special press conference that senior executives of a hotel in Zape had been operating a prostitution ring. Five of the suspects worked for the hotel, while the sixth suspect was a private chauffeur. The six suspects and the 96 sex workers were picked up by the police on Saturday, with all of them taken to the Public Prosecution Office (MP) on Monday.
The office was expected to release a statement on the matter in due course, an informed source said Monday night.
The Judiciary Police said on Sunday that 68-year-old Ho hired a mainland woman, surnamed Wang, in 2013 as a senior manager of the hotel where she was allegedly in charge of assigning rooms to sex workers, after they paid a 150,000 yuan “entrance fee” so that they could solicit clients in the hotel’s ground floor.
According to Sunday’s press conference, 95 of the sex workers are mainlanders and one is a Vietnamese national. During the press conference, a PJ spokesperson said the case was believed to be the biggest of its kind since the 1999 handover.
A PJ investigation launched in co-operation with mainland police in March last year found that over 2,400 sex workers stayed in the hotel since last year, estimating that the gang earned over 400 million patacas. Ho, Wang and four other suspects surnamed Lon, Mak, Pun and Qiao were arrested for their alleged involvement in the prostitution ring.
Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of Monday’s plenary session of the Legislative Assembly (AL), lawmakers Ho Ion Sang and Wong Kit Cheng urged the authorities to clamp down on prostitution and pimping. Ho Ion Sang, who works for the local branch of the Bank of China (BOC) said that the gaming industry is closely linked to prostitution, while Wong, a nurse by profession, said the law-enforcement agencies should tackle the issue of people distributing business style cards soliciting “massage” services in the streets around casinos, adding she believed that criminal organisations are involved.
“Massage” is a popular local euphemism for commercial sex. (macaunews/macaupost)
