SHIELA Guo’s appearance at the hearing of the Senate sub-committee on justice and human rights on Tuesday was her first, but she divulged more personal and relevant information to the senators than dismissed Bamban, Tarlac Mayor Alice Guo, her supposed sister. This information was about how the Guo siblings (Shiela, Alice and Wesley) fled the country through a fishing port in northern Luzon, by banca and a small boat to Mindanao, and through a short trip to Malaysia also by boat.
The Guos need to escape because there is a whole-of-government approach to pin them down on the operation of illegal Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators (POGOs) both in Bamban and in Porac, Pampanga, which is a highly lucrative business venture that combines online gambling with financial and other scams to fleece unsuspecting clients all over the world. This illegal business is run in the Philippines by foreigners, most of them Chinese.
‘The nation is waiting for official action from the President on this problem, an action that would depend on the Department of Justice’s own investigation of the whole Alice Guo affair.’
The series of Senate and House investigations on POGO operations prompted President Jr. to ban all POGOs, in a much-applauded announcement he made in his State of the Nation Address last month. The Chief Executive ordered the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. (Pagcor) to phase out both legal and illegal POGOs by the end of the year.
The congressional hearings may be an overkill and might not produce the needed new legislation that is the underlying reason for such an inquiry, but it laid bare the many flaws and weaknesses of the Philippine government’s rules, procedures and ordinances that are easily exploited by foreigners and their local cohorts for their criminal activities.
Some of these flaws are loose documentation at various civil register’s offices, the Philippine Statistics Office, the Department of Foreign Affairs passport offices, the Land Transportation Office (LTO), lax security at the ports supervised by MARINA and the Coast Guard, the Department of Transportation, etc., etc.
Connecting the thread of inefficiency in all these, of course, is graft and corruption which move things and make events happen in the bureaucracy. This last systemic flaw is pervasive as it is endemic and hard to control.
It was established at the Senate hearing that the Bureau of Immigration kept the President and the senators clueless on the whereabouts of Alice Guo, when in fact they knew through their contacts and counterparts abroad that she had escaped, shuttling from Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore like a tourist, and using her Philippine passport.
This angered Bongbong Marcos and promised that “heads will roll” and “there will be no sacred cows” but until now, no bloody skulls with hair are rolling from where he sat in the Palace.
The Philippine Coast Guard’s official explanation on why they were caught with their pants down when Alice Guo and her group slipped from the country was classic: the Philippines has a porous coastline. It is sad that Congress cannot do anything to remedy our being an archipelagic country.
The nation is waiting for official action from the President on this problem, an action that would depend on the Department of Justice’s own investigation of the whole Alice Guo affair.
