Land concessions in Macau are something of a “magic show,” with the different schemes the government has involved itself in with renewing or allocating blocks of land to investors, lawmaker Au Kam San, said yesterday.

During his interpellation before the order of the day, Au said he didn’t understand how blocks of land which have been vacant for years had their concessions renewed to the same company, without a prior public tender.

The issue with land concessions has raised many questions since the arrest of former secretary for public works and transport, Ao Man Long, who is currently being tried for the biggest corruption case Macau has ever witnessed.

According to the current law on land concessions, each concession is valid for 25 years, and if the developer keeps the land vacant for those 25 years, the government has the right to open another public tender for the land’s development. However, it hasn’t in the past few years, according to Au.

Detailed examples Au gave at the Legislative Assembly yesterday include a 60,000 square metre block of land in Taipa which was granted to a developer in 1980, and which to date hasn’t seen any development.

In this case, the concession agreement terminated in 2005, and there wasn’t the possibility of renewing the concession for another term, according to the current law on land, said Au. But regardless, the government and the concessionary entered an agreement which stated that the developer handed a letter to the Chief Executive asking for the cancellation of the contract, so that once the agreement ended, the land would be allocated to the same developer again, without the government opening a public tender.

“If this specific land had been put on the market, it could generate millions of patacas for public safeboxes, but with this method for allocating land [without public tender], the developer only had to pay 735 million patacas,” Au said.

At the time, former secretary for public works and transport Ao said that such a decision had been made so that the land did not return to the government, fearing judiciary action would be held against the government, the lawmaker added.

“This just shows that the [Macau] administration lost its faith on our judiciary bodies,” Au said, adding “but thank goodness that our rulers are not ashamed of giving out absurd responses and statements, and that bodies from the judiciary system don’t blush with such explanations [from the government].”

Another example Au gave in his interpellation relates to a 55,652 square metre block of land which was allocated to developer ‘Sociedade do Parque Industrial da Concordia Limitada’ to build a residential park with 14 lots in 1975. But between 1975 and this year, the land remains undeveloped.

In a response to a query Au posed the Lands, Public Works and Transport Bureau (DSSOPT), director Jaime Carion replied that the contract had ended in 2000 and that according to the law on lands it could not be renewed nor go beyond 25 years. But in that same response, Carion said the government was looking to renew the developer’s contract, according to the initial agreement between the government and the developer.

“Why did the government not proceed according to the law, and got the land back for new planning and a new concession via public tender?” Au said, adding that so far the government hasn’t replied as to why the concession was granted to the same developer without having to win the bid in a public tender.

“These magic shows leave us [the general public] undignified, since it causes great loss to society, and is becoming a new method for land concessions,” Au added.

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