OF SUBSTANCE AND SPIRIT
Some TikToks say it all. To afford a rare McLaren 620R, worth at least $280,000 or more than ₱16 million, one should get used to living in a farm and running a piggery business. Prepare to live a simple life, grow with your father’s workers and yes, do homeschooling. After a few years, branded jewelry, bags, and dresses worth millions of pesos would complete your ensemble as you ride your own chopper after winning a local election in a small town north of Luzon.
Many have been monitoring the Senate hearing and from all the public declarations of Mayor Alice Guo of Bamban, Tarlac, that is her story. That is her life. Change the details here and there like the McLaren that she said she just borrowed, but keep the details about the simple farm life of her childhood with no personal recollection of her playmates and the mother Amelia Leal that she never saw, and that’s Mayor Guo’s 38 years.
To be sure, there were more questions than answers that our senators elicited from the Bamban mayor.
Why she could not establish her origin escapes us. She could not recall who raised her up as a youngster,or who taught her at home except a certain Teacher Rubilyn. Her birth was registered only when she was 17, but there was no record of where she was actually born because hospital records are non-existent. Her residential address at best was fictitious. While she claimed her family had embroidery business in Valenzuela, a quick search revealed no such business was ever conducted there. She indicated a home address in Valenzuela but no less than Senator Sherwin Gatchalian belied it. Someone he knew owned the place. Most damning, both the couple whom she claimed as her parents have no existing birth and marriage records in the Philippine Statistics Authority. Whatever questions were thrown at her, Mayor Guo invariably insisted she grew up in the farm, and she lived a simple life.
As Senator Loren Legarda quipped, “para namang may script.”
But the script, although it looks expansive, was rather weak and incoherent because there remained many loose ends in Mayor Guo’s narrative. Securities and Exchange Commission records show she’s one of the incorporators holding substantial shareholdings in at least 11 companies since 2010. Allegedly born in July 1986, that means she was only about 24 years old when she amassed so much to have organized such a business network. She acquired a helicopter in 2019 at age 33 for an air taxi business but gave it up when the prospects did not reportedly prove promising. She also engaged in car dealership which she allegedly used to justify her ownership of 16 vehicles even as they remained under her name.
Her Statement of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth (SALN) showed very rapid increase in her net worth. The script failed to provide the mayor with the answer to the questions of the senators on how she accumulated higher net worth in such a short time.
Let’s be real, we can do a thousand iterations of the piggery or embroidery businesses, car dealership or similar business activities but no way could they yield a combined income to allow Mayor Guo to afford expensive jewelry and much less to finance the purchase of a chopper even for business that ultimately failed, and the 10 hectares of land on which POGO operators built a whole hub of gambling complex.
Before she ran for mayor of Bamban, Guo in September 2020 applied for a license to operate Hongsheng Gaming Technology, Inc. Before she was elected mayor, she claimed she divested from the business. When the same technology company was raided, it had rebranded itself as Zun Yuan Technology. During that raid, a Ford Expedition belonging to Guo was found. Electric bills of the Zun Yuan premises totalling some ₱15 million were charged to Guo herself and that covered the period as recent as September 2023 to February 2024.
Perhaps the script failed to anticipate the discovery of the so-called illegal activities at the POGO hub in Bamban in March 2024. What is suspicious here is that Zun Yuan was located in the Baofu compound just behind the Bamban municipal hall where the mayor holds office. Baofu Land Development that leased the compound to Zun Yuan is owned by no other than the mayor herself. The complex consists of 32 building structures with a reported tunnel structure as an escape route.
Why the mayor did not even bother to check the extensive POGO operations in her own property is a puzzle to many. The raid established that illegal activities such as human trafficking and illegal detention were done in the mayor’s property. Official reports showed that there are torture chambers in the complex, panic rooms, vaults containing millions of pesos and dollars with confiscated passports of foreign employees. The Bamban POGO was reported doing other business outside its license. Cyber fraud operations were suspected to have been committed.
What is left unsaid, and perhaps it was supposed to be in the subtext of the players rather than in the script, is the motivation of Guo in running for mayor of a second-class municipality where the POGO operations had been in full blast.
If we go by costs and benefits, it was argued in the Senate that the social and economic costs due to POGO including crimes, tax evasion, foregone foreign direct investments and tourism at some ₱143.3 billion far outweigh the benefits estimated at ₱134.86 billion for allowing POGO. Net cost to the country is more than ₱8.4 billion.
That is the paradox of POGO but somebody else wrote the script for us.