Senator Sherwin Gatchalian on Friday, July 12 disclosed that billions of alleged “unjustified” money went into the bank accounts of suspended Bamban, Tarlac Mayor Alice Guo sometime in 2019 to 2022.
Gatchalian made the revelation a day after the Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) announced that the Court of Appeals (CA) has ordered the freezing of Alice Guo’s bank accounts and personal assets and two other individuals allegedly linked to the illegal activities in Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators (POGOs).
Among those ordered frozen by the CA were the mayor’s 36 bank accounts, 12 land holdings, 12 motor vehicles and one helicopter.
“We’re talking about billions in a span of three years. Billions entered Alice Guo’s accounts, but if you look at the corporations, both the income statements and the statements of cash flow, it was only just in hundreds of thousands,” Gatchalian said in Filipino during an online interview on Friday.
The senator said the AMLC report on Guo’s assets is significant as it would show the money trail or the origins of the money. He, however, refused to divulge further details saying the AMLC will reveal it in the next hearings.
Nevertheless, a big portion of the money entering Guo’s accounts came from China, based on the AMLC report, he said.
“You can see that the money that enters Guo’s account came from different places, in the amount of billions, then it is released to different individuals and corporations especially for the construction of the POGO hub in Bamban,” the lawmaker said.
The freezing of Guo’s assets and accounts, he said, clearly shows that the mayor cannot justify where her money came from.
“They (AMLC) found out that the transactions were really suspicious and there is a high probability of money laundering. That’s why there were frozen immediately,” he added.
At the same time, Gatchalian said he suspects there was possible connivance among local banks that’s why the questionable entry of these amounts in Guo’s accounts went undetected.
“They may have been a connivance that’s why they did not report it to AMLC,” he said.
The Senate committee on women and children have been investigating Guo for her alleged link to the POGO activities in her town.
Senators have also questioned her identity following after noticing the inconsistencies about her nationality and personal life.
It was Gatchalian who first raised the possibility that Alice Guo could be Guo Hua Ping, a Chinese national who entered the Philippines in 1993. The National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) later on confirmed that Alice Guo and Guo Hua Ping's fingerprints matched during a fingerprint test.
The Senate panel has ordered the issuance of an arrest warrant against Guo for her failure to appear in the probe on the raided POGO hub in Bamban, Tarlac.
But Guo’s camp has asked the Supreme Court to invalidate and set aside the subpoena citing that the Senate panel committed grave abuse of discretion and has been violating her constitutional rights and right to due process.