Philippine officials are searching for a local mayor accused of being a Chinese spy. Alice Guo, mayor of the town of Bamban, has gone into hiding after refusing multiple requests to appear at investigative hearings centered on scams operating out of a casino facility "on land partially owned by the mayor," per CTV News. "She is hiding to evade arrest," says Filipino Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian, who is involved in a parliamentary investigation of Guo, per the BBC. He claims Guo is a Chinese citizen with ties to Chinese criminal syndicates. Under Philippine law, no foreign national can hold elective office.
The National Bureau of Investigation found Guo's fingerprints matched those of Guo Hua Ping, a Chinese national who came to the Philippines as a teenager in 2003, per the South China Morning Post. She's accused of receiving billions of dollars in "dirty money" through alleged ties to criminal syndicates that operated scams out of online casinos known as Pogos (Philippine Online Gaming Operations). Guo and some family members twice skipped out on hearings about the scams before the Senate ordered their arrests on Friday, per the BBC and CTV. The government's Anti-Money Laundering Council, which found evidence of human trafficking and fraud, has ordered her and her associates' assets frozen.
"Our tracker teams will continue looking for her," Gatchalian says, per the BBC. Guo, meanwhile, claims this is all a misunderstanding. She says she was born to a Chinese father and Filipina mother in the Philippines and raised on a pig farm. Her lawyer adds she has been unable to appear at the hearings because of a "physical and mental health condition" related to "massive cyber bullying and humiliation," per CTV. The case comes amid growing suspicion about China's activities in the Philippines. Manilla challenges Beijing's island and maritime claims in the South China Sea. (More Philippines stories.)
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