Posted on: July 11, 2024, 07:09h.
Last updated on: July 11, 2024, 07:09h.
The Philippine Senate has cited small-town mayor Alice Guo in contempt for twice failing to appear at a hearing examining allegations that she is a Chinese spy involved in human trafficking. She cited stress for the no-show.
On Thursday, authorities froze Guo’s assets and announced a warrant was being prepared for her arrest.
In a case that has gripped the Southeast Asian nation, Guo fell under suspicion in February after a police raid on a POGO (online gambling) compound in her town of Bamban in the northern province of Tarlac.
The business, Zun Yuan Technology, was suspected of involvement in crypto scams, human trafficking, and cybercrime.
Police discovered that the land on which the POGO was built was partially owned by Mayor Guo. Inside the compound, they found hundreds of trafficked workers. They also found Guo’s car.
Meanwhile, Guo’s Philippine citizenship is also under question amid inconsistencies in the details she provided about her birth and education. She claims to be a natural born Philippine citizen, the love child of a Chinese father and a Filipina maid, who had grown up “hidden” and friendless on a pig farm.
But the subsequent investigation into her background has uncovered contradictions in her story. For one, her wealth, which she had previously flaunted, was inconsistent with that of the mayor of a sleepy backwater.
Then, during a recent Senate hearing, she admitted that her birth certificate was registered when she was 17 years old. Meanwhile her fingerprints matched those of a Chinese national who entered the country as a teenager, investigators said this week.
At a recent Senate hearing, Sen. Risa Hontiveros said that while everyone in Bamban knew each other, nobody knew Guo before she ran for mayor. All of her social media accounts were registered in 2022.
The mystery surrounding Guo has led to the accusations that she is a Chinese agent, which she denies. She also claims she sold her interest in the land that hosted Zun Yuan Technology just before launching her mayoral campaign.
The case comes at a time of strained relations between Manila and Beijing, which have long been at loggerheads over territories in the South China Sea. Those tensions have escalated under the Philippines’ new president, Bongbong Marcos.
“No one knows her,” Marcos told reporters in May. “We wonder where she came from. That’s why we are investigating this, together with the Bureau of Immigration, because of the questions about her citizenship.”
There is a climate of anxiety, too, around the presence of POGO industry, which is dominated by Chinese nationals. The acronym stands for Philippine Offshore Gaming Operator. POGOs are licensed and operational in the Philippines but target customers based outside the country, mainly China.
There have been increasing calls to ban POGOs because of their links to organized crime, but now, also, because they are viewed as a potential threat to national security.
Over 4,000 POGO-linked crimes, including kidnapping and murder, were reported from January 2017 to the first half of last year, according to the Philippine National Police.
