Macau billionaire on trial in US over United Nations bribery case

The long-awaited corruption trial of a billionaire Macau property boss with top-level connections to both Beijing and Washington will open tomorrow with the ­accused expected to tell a US court he is the victim of politically motivated prosecution aimed at blocking China’s growing influence in the developing world.

Nearly two years after his ­arrest in New York – on the same day President Xi Jinping arrived in the US on an official visit – Ng Lap-seng will stand trial in Manhattan on charges he bribed senior United Nations officials

to support the building of a ­multibillion-dollar conference centre in Macau.

The billionaire, 69, who teamed up with US President Donald Trump in a failed bid for a Macau casino licence in 2001, has pleaded not guilty to charges that he paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes.

A Chinese national once linked to a Democratic fundraising scandal when Bill Clinton was US president and who sat on the powerful Beijing-appointed committee which oversaw Macau’s return to Chinese sovereignty in December 1999, Ng is one of at least seven people charged since 2015 in the UN-related federal corruption probe.

Prosecutors said Ng, who also ran a hotel and casino in Macau popular with personnel from the People’s Liberation Army, paid more than US$500,000 in bribes to John Ashe, a former UN ­General Assembly president and ambassador from Antigua and Barbuda, and bribed Francis ­Lorenzo, a former deputy UN ­ambassador from the Dominican Republic.