THE Office of the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms yesterday assured the safety of suspended Bamban Tarlac Mayor Alice Guo, her family, and a resource person if they are detained on the strength of arrest warrants issued by the Senate Committee on Women for contempt.
Roberto Angcan, the Senate sergeant-at-arms, said a former daycare center beside a PNP station inside the Senate compound in Pasay City will serve as the detention center for Guo and her siblings Shiela, Siemen, and Wesley; father Jian Zhong Guo, and suspected mother Lin Wen Yi.
The Supreme Court, meanwhile, required the Senate panel chaired by Sen. Risa Hontiveros to answer the petition filed last week by Guo seeking the High Court’s intervention so she could not be forced to attend the Senate hearings on her alleged involvement in the operation of an illegal offshore gaming facility in her town.
SC spokesperson Camille Sue Ting said the Court en banc required the Senate Committee on Women, Children, Family Relations, and Gender Equality to “file its comment to the petition and prayer for temporary restraining order within a non-extendible period of 10 days from notice.”
Angcan said Senate President Francis Escudero wanted the Guo family detained at the former daycare center so they could be together.
He said Dennis Cunanan, the former director of the Technology and Livelihood Resource Center, can be detained in a room in the basement of the Senate building where Nancy Gamo, the Guo family’s accountant, is detained in another room.
Angcan said the Guo family’s would-be detention center has bunker beds with beddings and pillows, adding all of them, including Cunanan and Gamo, would be provided three meals a day “with snacks.”
He said their relatives can bring food if they want.
“Here, I can assure her security 24/7. I’ve done it before when I was a commander,” said Angcan, a retired military official who belongs to the Philippine Military Academy Class of 1987.
He said that Guo and her family may be encouraged to surrender now that their safety and security have been guaranteed.
“Nakita niyo naman may aircon. ‘Yung iba nga walang aircon, comfortable naman sila, and may toilet and bath, may water. Hindi siya hotel type but comfortable naman (Their room has an air-conditioning unit while other rooms do not. They will be comfortable here–they have their toilet and bath, with water supply. It is not of a hotel standard but at least they will be comfortable here),” he said.
Angcan said relatives and their legal counsels can visit them any time, while friends can be allowed during office hours after they have been screened.
He said electronic gadgets are still not allowed since easing that regulation is still under review on the order of Escudero. He said the Guos and other detainees can use the OSAA phones should they want to contact someone outside.
Angcan said the Senate decided to use the former daycare center in anticipation of a large number of resource persons who would be ordered arrested by the Senate committee.
Last Monday, Stephen David, Guo’s legal counsel, said the suspended mayor is considering attending the next scheduled hearing on July 29 after she was told that she cannot be in hiding for the rest of her life.
Gou skipped the past hearings last June 26 and July 10, saying past hearings have taken a toll on her physical and mental health.
Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian, in a chance interview yesterday, said he has been in contact with the school where Guo reportedly attended Grades 1 to 3 to get the names of her classmates who shared an old class picture showing their classmate Guo Hua Ping.
The National Bureau of Investigation had said that Mayor Guo and Guo Hua Ping, a Chinese who entered the country when she was 13 in 2003, are one and the same.
Gatchalian, who went to the same school where Go Hua Ping studied, said he learned of the class pictures in the news.
“May mga taong naging kaklase ni Guo Hua Ping from Grades 1 to 3. Kinukuha ko lang ang mga names ng alumni naming kung sino ‘yun para makausap ko mismo ang mga kaklase niya (There are people who are saying that Guo Hua Ping was their classmate from Grades 1 to 3. I am getting the names of our alumni so I can talk to them),” he said.
Gatchalian said Guo has not yet been arrested based on a report he asked from the OSAA yesterday.
He is confident that Guo cannot leave the country due to the arrest order of the Senate which has the effect of a hold departure order.
“Confident ako na nandito pa, unless pipilitin niyang mag backdoor sa Zamboanga, Tawi-tawi, then ibang usapan na iyon. Pero mga normal entry at exit points natin, naka-alerto na ang ating Bureau of Immigration (I am confident that she is still here unless she will force her way out using the backdoor in Zamboanga or Tawi-tawi, which is another issue. But as to the normal entry and exit points, our Bureau of Immigration has already been alerted),” he said.
Gatchalian also said the hearing scheduled on July 29 can be held even without Guo, adding he would focus on the partner of Guo regarding the issues of money laundering.
He said he was not surprised that Guo’s Facebook account had been deleted.
In her 78-page petition for certiorari, Guo, through David, also asked the High Court to annul the subpoena issued by Hontiveros’ panel.
“It is most respectfully prayed of this Honorable Court that the instant petition be given due course and an order be issued directing the respondent Committee from further inviting or causing the Petitioner to appear as resource person on matters and resolutions subject of the Instant Letters and Subpoena Ad Testificandum,” Guo said in her plea.
She asked that a temporary restraining order and or writ of preliminary injunction be issued against the implementation of the Senate panel’s subpoena and from placing her as a resource person in the Senate inquiry.
In seeking the SC’s help, Guo said she was already adjudged guilty in the ongoing Senate probe.
Guo, who had been slapped with a six-month suspension by the Office of the Ombudsman while the investigation on her alleged involvement in the POGO operation in Bamban is ongoing, skipped last week’s Senate hearing, prompting the Senate committee to issue an arrest order against her.
Aside from her supposed involvement in the illegal POGO operation, Guo’s citizenship is also being questioned due to her inconsistent answers about her background and dubious documents regarding her Filipino citizenship.
Charges of human trafficking have also been filed against her before the Department of Justice while the Office of the Solicitor General asked a Tarlac court last week to cancel her birth certificate.
Guo has denied involvement in the POGO operation and insisted she is a Filipino citizen.
‘PROBE NEEDED’
Camarines Sur Rep. Luis Raymund Villafuerte said authorities have to find out how foreigners have secured official documents from the Philippines Statistics Authority (PSA) or the Bureau of Immigration (BI), which they use to pass themselves off as Filipinos.
“The case of the suspended mayor, who has not only been linked to POGOs believed engaged in serious crimes but even got herself elected as the first mayora (female mayor) of her hometown of Bamban (in Tarlac) despite her now questioned Filipino citizenship and background, should spur the full-blown investigation of how seemingly shady aliens like her have managed to obtain government documents and IDs (identification cards) attesting to their being legit Filipinos,” Villafuerte said.
“Obviously, a ton of money has been changing hands, so a thorough probe is in order to pinpoint–and haul to jail–those in and out of the government who are behind this citizenship-for-a-price racket, which has apparently been in play for years, if not decades, now,” added Villafuerte, principal author of the House-approved bill seeking to modernize the Bureau of Immigration (BI).
Villafuerte said the citizenship racket must end right away, considering that hundreds or thousands of foreigners, in apparent cahoots with unscrupulous people in the government, “have been able to enter the Philippines on the sly and then join or set up criminal gangs or POGOs that are engaged in cybercrimes, human trafficking, kidnapping and torture, among others, or even in espionage or hacking of government websites.
“That this very alarming scam has been going on for years can be gleaned from the fact that Guo and one of her siblings had reportedly managed to register as Filipinos with the PSA more than a decade after their supposed births in the Philippines,” he said.
That Guo’s case is not an isolated one can be inferred, added Villafuerte, from the fact that last weekend, two women suspected of Chinese origin were nabbed at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) with passports and other government-issued IDs claiming they were Filipinos but who, upon questioning at the NAIA immigration counter, gave inconsistent statements as to where they were born or where they grew up and studied in.
Villafuerte said the authorities concerned should verify a report reaching the Senate that aliens could get fake birth certificates, passports, driver’s licenses and other government-issued IDs identifying them as Filipinos in exchange for P300,000 each.
The NBI has also uncovered a scheme used by Chinese citizens in Davao del Sur who were able to get certificates of live birth from the civil registry of Santa Cruz town over the 2018-2019 period. — With Ashzel Hachero and Wendell Vigilia