A Chinese 'asset'? Philippines raises alarm over mystery mayor suspected of links to Pogos
Alarms have been raised over Alice Leal Guo, the mayor of a small town in the Philippines, due to suspicions about her citizenship and her alleged ties to a controversial offshore gaming operator, with one senator suggesting she might be an undercover agent of China.
"Is she, along with others like her who have mahiwaga [mysterious] backgrounds, an asset inserted by China into our government to have a heavy influence in Philippine politics?" Senator Risa Hontiveros asked during a press conference on May 8.
Hontiveros' comments came a day after a senate hearing in which Guo failed to provide details about her early life and background, fuelling suspicions about her links to Zun Yuan Technology Corp, a Philippine offshore gaming operator (Pogo) in the Baofu compound in Bamban, a town northwest of Manila where Guo has been mayor since 2022.
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Investigators have accused Pogos of being involved in human trafficking, cyber scams and possibly hacking and surveillance of government agencies.
During a senate hearing on May 7, Hontiveros warned that "separate sources in the intelligence community and various executive agencies are sounding the alarm of large tracts of land around EDCA sites being purchased by Chinese nationals with Filipino identity documents [involving] late registration of birth".
EDCA sites are joint US-Philippine military facilities, created through the two countries' Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement, that allow for the rotational presence of US troops. Bamban is located 30km north of Basa Air Base, one of the country's nine EDCA sites.
Summoned to that hearing, Guo, 37, appeared unable or unwilling to explain gaps in her background. She testified that she had only applied for a birth certificate at 17, claimed she had no hospital birth records because she was born at home, and said she was homeschooled, leaving no formal school records. She said her father had both a Filipino name - Angelito Guo - and a Chinese one, Jian Zhong Guo.
Guo, who showed fluency in Tagalog, initially told the senate committee she only spoke a "little" Mandarin. She admitted having learned the language from her father and through "self-study" after Hontiveros said she had information the mayor was proficient in Mandarin.
Guo described her business as hog raising. The politician also owned a helicopter that she reportedly sold to a British company earlier this year. She initially denied the aircraft was hers when shown a photo of it by Hontiveros, but later admitted the purchase.
The mayor frequently answered questions with "Hindi ko po alam" ("I don't know"), prompting Hontiveros to call Guo's answers "opaque", especially regarding her personal background. She described Guo as someone who "figuratively came out of nowhere and afterwards became mayor".
The official website of Bamban also does not have any information about Guo's background.
Recent photos on social media of Guo posing with President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr and senator Imee Marcos also prompted Hontiveros to question whether Pogos had "protectors in higher places".
After the hearing, the senator accused the mayor of lying, calling some of Guo's replies "stark and shocking", especially those denying her links to Hong Sheng, a Pogo operating out of the Baofu compound that had been raided in 2023.
Guo was introduced and endorsed as a candidate in 2021 by the town's outgoing mayor, before running for office the following year. The Commission on Elections (Comelec) on Tuesday, however, revealed Guo's certificate of candidacy showed she had only registered as a voter in 2021.
Inquirer.net reported that Comelec chief George Garcia said the mayor was under investigation and could be charged with perjury if it was proved she was not a Filipino citizen.
Hontiveros' office told This Week in Asia she would not take any questions yet because "we are still coordinating with intelligence agencies and vetting a lot of information".
Guo's background came under scrutiny when the Presidential Anti-Organised Crime Commission (PAOCC) raided the Baofu complex in March following a report by a young Vietnamese man who said he and others had been forced to work there as online scammers.
Authorities found an online network run by hundreds of Filipinos and Chinese as well as people from Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Rwanda, Taiwan and Kyrgyzstan.
Investigators described the Baofu compound, which spans nearly eight hectares (19.8 acres), as being akin to a mini city, consisting of 34 structures including an office building with a grocery, a warehouse, and plush villas built around a swimming pool. There was also a costly wine cellar.
In the office building and deep inside the warehouses, investigators discovered rows of computer workstations festooned with notes and scripts on how to conduct romance and crypto scams, and metal racks full of dozens of smartphones.
They also found the villas connected with tunnels and having secret panic rooms - days after the raid, four Chinese nationals emerged from these secret rooms into the arms of law enforcers detailed to watch the place.
PAOCC senior technical adviser Winston John R. Casio said the "big boss" of Zun Yuan was Chinese criminal Huang Zhiyang, who has passports from China, Cyprus and Saint Kitts. The Chinese government has put out a warrant for his arrest, but Huang has so far eluded capture.
When investigators cracked open 27 vaults in the villas, among the items they found were assorted passports, phones, flash drives, cash - and documents such as electricity, housekeeping and maintenance bills addressed to Alice Leal Guo. One of the 63 vehicles seized in the Baofu compound, a Ford Expedition, was registered to Alice Guo.
Officials also recovered records related to other Pogos which were supposed to have been shut down but apparently continued to operate in the compound.
"On April 5, because we saw documents connecting Bamban's current chief executive [Guo] with the operations of Zun Yuan and Hong Sheng, we formed a task force to find out the accountability, if any, of Bamban's chief executive," Casio told the committee.
Guo denied knowledge of the Pogo operations even though the huge complex was located behind her office. She admitted she had owned 50 per cent of Baofu, the property owner, but had divested it prior to running for mayor.
When he became president in 2016, Rodrigo Duterte threw the country's doors wide open to Pogos, claiming they would bring billions of pesos. But Pogos turned out to be largely run by crime syndicates that brought in hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers, operated illegal scams and were involved in prostitution, kidnapping, murder and corruption.
Authorities in the hearing said Pogos continued operating under various guises despite getting their licences revoked and being raided by law enforcement agencies.
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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