US says Macau billionaire Ng Lap-seng hoped UN bribery would cement his legacy

Ng Lap-seng’s dream of “fame and more fortune” drove the Macau billionaire to bribe United Nations officials to win support for a multibillion-dollar conference centre he hoped to build, a US prosecutor said on Tuesday near the end of Ng’s criminal trial.

In her closing argument in the US District Court in Manhattan, Assistant US Attorney Janis Echenberg said Ng bypassed the rules of international diplomacy to try to construct the “Geneva of Asia,” and “cement his legacy.”

But a lawyer for Ng, Tai Park, accused prosecutors of spinning a “spider web of inferences and suppositions” to transform activity the defendant was asked to do by diplomats into crimes. “It is frankly outrageous,” he said.

Ng, 69, has pleaded not guilty to bribery and money laundering charges.

Prosecutors said he hoped the Macau centre would regularly host events for developing countries as well as fuel the expansion of his real estate empire through the nearby construction of luxury housing, hotels, a shopping mall, marinas and a heliport.

Ng is accused of paying more than US$1 million of bribes to Francis Lorenzo, a former deputy ambassador of the Dominican Republic to the UN, and the late John Ashe, a former UN General Assembly president, during a five-year scheme.

“The defendant cheated,” Echenberg said. “Having the United Nations be a central part of this project would bring tens of thousands of people to Macau, and the defendant himself could take credit for making Macau, as he called it, the ‘Geneva of Asia.’”