MANILA, Philippines — Dismissed Bamban, Tarlac mayor Alice Guo and her siblings, Shiela and Wesley, fled the country by sea or through the porous backdoor before reaching an island resort in Sabah, Malaysia in the middle of July.
The Guo siblings left the country through Zambales where they took a small boat and then transferred to a “bigger ship” and after three to four days transferred again to a smaller vessel to reach Sabah.
This was how Shiela narrated their flight. Speaking in Filipino, Shiela testified that her sister merely asked her to accompany her outside the country because “she was sad and bored.”
Shiela made her first appearance at the Senate hearing on Tuesday. She was arrested in Batam, Indonesia last August 20 together with the Guos’ business associate Cassandra Ong.
Meanwhile, over P792 million worth of assets of the Philippine offshore gaming operators (POGO) hub in Bamban were believed to be linked to illegal activities such as money laundering and human trafficking.
Adrian Arpon, Anti Money Laundering Council deputy director, said that with regard to the alleged illegal POGOs in Bamban, the AMLC had filed a petition to freeze their assets.
“And at present we have frozen in peso equivalent a total of 251 million plus. There were also assets that we’ve frozen, real properties amounting to almost 465 million [pesos], for motor vehicles 76 million [pesos],” he said.
“For civil forfeiture we have already filed. For the criminal case for money laundering we are in coordination with the different law enforcement agencies and we are expecting to file the first batch of money laundering cases hopefully within the week,” said Arpon.
SISTER’S STATEMENT Shiela Guo, sister of fugitive ex-Bamban, Tarlac mayor Alice Guo, appears before a hearing presided by Sen. Risa Hontiveros, inside the Philippine Senate in Pasay City, on Aug. 27, 2024. PHOTO BY MIKE ALQUINTO
SISTER’S STATEMENT Shiela Guo, sister of fugitive ex-Bamban, Tarlac mayor Alice Guo, appears before a hearing presided by Sen. Risa Hontiveros, inside the Philippine Senate in Pasay City, on Aug. 27, 2024. PHOTO BY MIKE ALQUINTO
SISTER’S STATEMENT Shiela Guo, sister of fugitive ex-Bamban, Tarlac mayor Alice Guo, appears before a hearing presided by Sen. Risa Hontiveros, inside the Philippine Senate in Pasay City, on Aug. 27, 2024. PHOTO BY MIKE ALQUINTO
SISTER’S STATEMENT Shiela Guo, sister of fugitive ex-Bamban, Tarlac mayor Alice Guo, appears before a hearing presided by Sen. Risa Hontiveros, inside the Philippine Senate in Pasay City, on Aug. 27, 2024. PHOTO BY MIKE ALQUINTO
SISTER’S STATEMENT Shiela Guo, sister of fugitive ex-Bamban, Tarlac mayor Alice Guo, appears before a hearing presided by Sen. Risa Hontiveros, inside the Philippine Senate in Pasay City, on Aug. 27, 2024. PHOTO BY MIKE ALQUINTO
SISTER’S STATEMENT Shiela Guo, sister of fugitive ex-Bamban, Tarlac mayor Alice Guo, appears before a hearing presided by Sen. Risa Hontiveros, inside the Philippine Senate in Pasay City, on Aug. 27, 2024. PHOTO BY MIKE ALQUINTO
SISTER’S STATEMENT Shiela Guo, sister of fugitive ex-Bamban, Tarlac mayor Alice Guo, appears before a hearing presided by Sen. Risa Hontiveros, inside the Philippine Senate in Pasay City, on Aug. 27, 2024. PHOTO BY MIKE ALQUINTO
SISTER’S STATEMENT Shiela Guo, sister of fugitive ex-Bamban, Tarlac mayor Alice Guo, appears before a hearing presided by Sen. Risa Hontiveros, inside the Philippine Senate in Pasay City, on Aug. 27, 2024. PHOTO BY MIKE ALQUINTO
SISTER’S STATEMENT Shiela Guo, sister of fugitive ex-Bamban, Tarlac mayor Alice Guo, appears before a hearing presided by Sen. Risa Hontiveros, inside the Philippine Senate in Pasay City, on Aug. 27, 2024. PHOTO BY MIKE ALQUINTO
Sen. Risa Hontiveros asked Immigration Commissioner Norman Tansingco regarding the timeline and actions taken by the Bureau of Immigration (BI) concerning the mayor’s escape from the Philippines.
“When did the BI know that Alice Guo has fled the country?” Hontiveros asked during the public hearing on her proposal for the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) to cancel Guo’s passport to force her to return to the Philippines and answer the charges filed against her.
Tansingco said they received information on Guo’s escape from the PNP on August 15 or four days before Hontiveros delivered her privilege speech seeking the cancellation of Alice’s passport but finished validating the data on August 19 and 20.
Hontiveros, who posed the same question to the National Bureau of Investigation, Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission and the Department of Justice, said a better and more timely coordination should have been taken by the concerned agencies.
“Just a note to Commissioner Tansingco…you assured us in a previous hearing that the BI would not allow Alice Guo to leave the country. Yet, it would seem that Alice Guo had slipped from the grasp of the BI, the very agency responsible for guarding our borders,” Hontiveros said in Filipino.
Hontiveros said that the Guo siblings and their companion Cassandra Li Ong, presented Philippine passports before Indonesian immigration.
She said this would not have been possible had the DFA immediately cancelled their passports.
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