What a mysterious death tells you about the future of Macau

Almost a year has passed since the first woman to head Macau’s customs service was found slumped in a pool of blood inside a public toilet with a plastic bag pulled over her head, her wrists and throat slashed and an empty bottle of sleeping pills by her side.

Despite their best efforts, doctors at the only public hospital in the city that has out-Vegased Las Vegas to become the most lucrative gaming destination on the planet could not save 56-year-old mother of two Lai Man Wa, who had been in the top job only a matter of months.

Had events not taken such a tragic turn, at the point when Lai was declared dead by medics at the city’s Hospital Conde San Januario, she should have been in a top-level meeting with senior mainland officials in nearby Zhuhai discussing the integrity of the Macau Special Administrative Region’s borders with mainland China.

It was a meeting which no one – including the driver who had dropped his “perfectly normal” boss off at her home in Taipa Island less than two hours before her body was discovered – had any reason to think she would not be attending. For Beijing, the issue of Macau’s borders and the apparent ease with which gigantic amounts of illicit cash had been able to flow out of the nation to the extent that it posed a clear and present danger to the stability of the financial system couldn’t be more important.

Senior Macau officials quickly – very quickly – classified Lai’s death as suicide by asphyxiation, firmly denying accusations of a cover up. But the lack of a detailed explanation of her demise – aside from a blanket statement that she was not under investigation by anti-corruption agencies – sparked widespread speculation.