With law enforcers and regulators already getting hold of ample evidence to nail down suspended Mayor Alice Leal Guo and her cohorts on a slew of criminal and administrative charges, a Congress leader cited the need for concerned government authorities to look into how foreign nationals like Guo secured fake government documents.
Rep. Luis Raymund Villafuerte of Camarines Sur said the authorities should find out how foreign nationals have been able to secure official documents from the Philippines Statistics Authority (PSA) or the Bureau of Immigration (BI) as he raised concerns that these foreign nationals are able to pass themselves off as legitimate Filipinos and then engage in businesses that are mere fronts for criminal syndicates.
“The case of the suspended mayor, who has not only been linked to POGOs (Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators) believed to be 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” said Villafuerte, principal author of the House-approved bill seeking to modernize the Bureau of Immigration (BI).
He noted that, “This citizenship racket must end pronto, considering that hundreds or thousands of foreign nationals, in apparent cahoots with unscrupulous government people, have been able to enter the Philippines on the sly and then join or put up criminal gangs or POGOs that are actually 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, Villafuerte said.
And 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.
