Immigration looking at P200-M bribe for Guo escape

By John Victor D. Ordoñez, Reporter

THE Bureau of Immigration (BI) on Tuesday said it is investigating a lead on one of its high-ranking officers who allegedly accepted a P200-million bribe from a former town mayor in exchange for her escape in July.

“We have received intelligence information regarding this amount, but we are still validating if a person associated with the BI received this,” bureau Intelligence Division chief Fortunato S. Manahan, Jr. told a Senate hearing.

The Senate is looking into ex-Bamban Mayor Alice l. Guo’s alleged links to Chinese criminal syndicates. She has been accused of having links with illegal Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators (POGO). She has denied the allegations and insists she is a natural-born Filipino.

Ms. Guo left the Philippines in July but was deported after she was arrested in Jakarta this month.

Mr. Manahan said the bureau would immediately file criminal charges if it finds proof that the Immigration officer colluded with the former mayor.

At the same hearing, retired General Raul P. Villanueva, senior vice president of Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp.’s (Pagcor) security and monitoring cluster, said a former national police chief might have also helped Ms. Guo escape.

“There were discussions [about the bribe], including a Philippine National Police (PNP) official who was involved but I cannot confirm this yet,” he told senators in mixed English and Filipino.

Ms. Guo, who was arrested in Jakarta on Sept. 4, earlier told senators that she fled the country via a yacht.

She has been accused of coddling an illegal POGO in Bamban, Tarlac, where she ran and won for the first time as mayor in 2022. Raided by authorities in March, an illegal hub on land she partially owned had been linked to scamming operations.

Meanwhile, Senator Sherwin T. Gatchalian said he is seeking a probe into banks failing to flag suspicious transactions linked to POGOs, which are companies that operate online casinos and target Chinese clients.

“The failure of these banks to report these dubious transactions raises the matter of the effectiveness of their internal controls and procedures for identifying and reporting suspicious transactions,” he said in a statement, citing Senate Resolution 1193, which he filed on Sept. 11.

He cited 2020 banking transactions in the hundreds of millions of pesos from companies supposedly owned by Ms. Guo.

The Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) and several other agencies in late August jointly filed multiple complaints of money laundering against Ms. Guo and 35 others before the Justice department.

On top of this, Ms. Guo is facing lawsuits before the Ombudsman and Commission on Elections (Comelec).

The National Bureau of Investigation earlier matched her fingerprints with a Chinese national named Guo Hua Ping.

In his third address to Congress, Philippine President Ferdinand R. Marcos, Jr. ordered Pagcor to shutter POGO companies by the end of the year, citing their links to human trafficking and torture.

A former national police chief helping the dismissed mayor escape would show that POGO money could influence the highest ranks of the government if proven true, Senator Ana Theresia N. Hontiveros said at the same hearing.

“If we don’t stop the plague, the next President, senators, the next government leaders of our country may be bankrolled by POGO money,” she told the hearing in mixed English and Filipino.