From BusinessMirror: Besides the passport system, Lacson said the Pogo-Alice Guo case showed the Philippine Statistics Authority has a problem with its national ID system. “It may very well be that our PhilSys, national ID, has also been compromised, as identity theft has been reported.”

‘Guo’s Pogo caper exposed serious breach to institutions, natl security’

Butch Fernandez / September 16, 2024

A FORMER senator on Sunday said serious risks to the country’s institutions and security, notably the prostituted segments of the Philippine official documents system that in turn can allow aliens or criminal syndicates to control key positions through elections, were exposed in the Alice Guo POGO (Philippine Overseas Gaming Operations) case.

Former Sen. Panfilo Lacson shared this insight at the weekend in an interview with Cely Ortega Bueno on dwIZ’s “Usapang Senado.”

Asked about dismissed Bamban, Tarlac, mayor Alice Guo, whose claimed Filipino citizenship was unravelled by an NBI report showing she shared the same fingerprints as Chinese national Guo Hua Ping, Lacson noted that as this case showed, “it’s hard for just one person to pull that off.”

He meant getting a fake Filipino birth certificate through a sham process of “late birth registration,” and then setting up businesses while laundering money for wanted criminal figures from other countries, and eventually seeking and winning elections as a pseudo Filipino.

“Try going to China or any foreign country and start investing in business and politics—not even for mayor, but for, say, village chairman, and let’s see if we can pull it off. That’s hard to carry out without the help of people who are in influential positions or are good at faking documents,” Lacson said, partly in Filipino.

He said this is the classic network needed for a spy, because “you can pull off something that an ordinary person cannot.”

He conceded that it has become easy to pull off documents fraud because many locals are easy to corrupt. “That’s another major concern. It exposed the weakness or vulnerabilities of our agencies tasked to. safeguard the integrity of records,” he added.

It means, he said that if this were a test case for embedding a spy or a criminal, “it showed how easy it is to manipulate our key agencies tasked to safeguard records. We all know that many Chinese nationals were able to secure passports, and investigation showed at least 200 were able to do so.”

Besides the passport system, the Pogo-Alice Guo case showed the Philippine Statistics Authority has a problem with its national ID system. “It may very well be that our PhilSys, national ID, has also been compromised, as identity theft has been reported.” He noted with concern that the contractor for the National ID was also recently fired by the central bank for failure to comply with deliverables.

Lacson, a retired four-star general and former chief of the National Police before getting elected senator, had championed the bill mandating a National ID system, so his disappointment was palpable.

Meanwhile, he said the latest Senate hearings after Guo was arrested in Indonesia and returned to Manila showed “she is very smart, you can hardly squeeze anything from her.” He watched the replay of the hearing and observed that “she was so adamant and consistent in her replies even though senators repeatedly confronted her with evidence of her fake nationality and identity.”

He noted, “that is the trait of a trained and smart spy.” He qualified this by saying he is not concluding yet that Guo is a spy, but urged senators to check deeper into her identity. “Who is her father. Does he have a connection with the Chinese Communist Party or how high up is that connection?”

He continued: “All of that is part of what we call a complete background investigation. I’m assuming our intelligence agencies are doing that and perhaps they are not announcing anything yet.”

Meanwhile, Lacson could not commit on whether the well-connected trader-acquaintance he reported on recently would be willing to attend a Senate hearing to elaborate on his claim that Guo offered P1 billion for help to resolve all her legal problems.

The offer was apparently made sometime in July, or just before Guo was reported to have fled to Malaysia, and eventually Indonesia. “The offer was P1 billion for help to remove all her legal problems.”

Lacson said his trader-friend is out of the country right now.