This was what Surigao del Norte Rep. Robert “Ace” Barbers said in describing the path that lawyer and former presidential spokesperson Harry Roque, now again facing detention for defying a subpoena of the House of Representatives’ quad committee, appears to be treading.

Barbers, who heads the quad committee looking into, among others, the alleged irregularities of Philippine offshore gaming operators (Pogos) during the previous administration, recalled to CoverStory.ph on Saturday night how Roque as spokesperson of President Rodrigo Duterte would warn those being probed that if they did nothing bad, then they had nothing to fear and should face accusations.

“Now that applies to you,” the lawmaker said of Roque, who is facing a second but longer detention period in the House for his failure to submit documents that would show he had not benefited from a Pogo being investigated for illegal activities in Porac, Pampanga.

The quad committee again cited Roque in contempt after he failed to produce the documents at a hearing on Sept. 12. It was the third hearing that he had skipped. He was first cited in contempt by the quad committee and held for 24 hours in the House detention facility after he was deemed to have lied about his whereabouts during the second hearing last Aug. 16.

As of Sunday morning, Roque had yet to be served the arrest warrant issued by the quad committee.
The panel, made up of four House committees, is conducting an inquiry into the possible correlations among illegal Pogos, the trade in illegal drugs, and extrajudicial killings during the Duterte administration.

Increased assets

So far, Roque has been asked to explain the surge of his wealth during the boom period of Pogos. Batangas Rep. Gerville Luistro raised questions on the sudden increase of Roque’s assets—from P125,000 before 2016 to P125 million in 2018.

Roque had promised the quad committee to produce documents to show that his family sold a 1.8-hectare property of his late aunt, the proceeds of which supposedly went to his family-owned company and subsidiaries. But he reneged on that commitment and instead filed a motion to stop the committee from getting the documents; the committee in turn threw out his motion during its Sept.12 hearing.

Roque has been linked to Lucky South 99, the raided Pogo hub in Porac where documents with his signature were found. He has repeatedly denied any connection with Lucky South 99.

From the hearings, Roque was found to have accompanied Katherine Cassandra Li Ong, a stakeholder of Whirlwind Corp., to the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp., for the settlement of unpaid dues for a Pogo license.

Ong, along with Sheila Guo, the supposed sister of ex-Mayor Alice Guo of Bamban, Tarlac, are currently detained in the House after they were ordered arrested by the quad committee. Ong and the Guos fled the Philippines in July but they have since been separately arrested in Indonesia and transported back to the country.

Alice Guo, said to be a Chinese national, is being investigated for her links to an illegal Pogo in Bamban. She is under court detention in Valenzuela City.

‘Witch hunt’

Roque has publicly described the quad committee as a “kangaroo court” engaged in a “witch hunt,” angering its members.

Barbers recalled to CoverStory.ph that Roque, then a party-list congressman, manifested during the 2016 House investigation of allegations that then senator Leila de Lima had benefited from the illegal drug trade, that he was taking exception to her statement that the inquiry was a “kangaroo court.”

At that time, De Lima had refused to attend the House hearings, which she likened to “the Salem witch trials” in the United States, with her being “burn[ed]at the stake.”

“And now [Roque] is saying the same thing, that the quad committee is a kangaroo court. What’s the saying? What goes around, comes around,” Barbers said.
According to the lawmaker, the problem with Roque is that he is badmouthing the quad committee after attending its hearings.

“This is a request [to Roque] from a former colleague. He should not insult the panel. He can do it in front of us; that’s our challenge to him,” Barbers said, adding that the committee would act if he alleges that it is violating his rights.

Roque filed a motion to squash the panel subpoena ordering him to submit his statements of assets and liabilities from 2016 to 2022, his and his wife Maila’s income tax returns from 2014 to 2022 and their respective medical certificates, the extrajudicial settlement of the estate including the tax returns of his late aunt, and the deed of sale with tax returns and transfer of property of the 1.8-hectare property in Multinational Village, Paranaque City, that his family had supposedly sold.

Next hearing set

The quad committee is hoping that Roque would be served the arrest warrant before its next hearing set for Wednesday or Thursday.

Barbers said Roque’s law firm in Makati City had refused to accept the arrest warrant brought by the House sergeant at arms who waited until the office closed its doors on Friday night. He said he had not yet received any feedback from the House sergeant at arms, whose next stop, he said, should be Roque’s residence.

The lawmaker said the arrest order also stipulates that Roque be placed in the Bureau of Immigration’s lookout bulletin, “so we will know if he will leave the country.”
Asked what would happen if Roque remains elusive, Barbers said law enforcement authorities would have to look for him “until they locate him, and bring him to the House detention facility.”

Barbers said Roque’s no-show at the House would make things look bad for him because “this is his opportunity to clarify and answer the allegations against him.”

Should Roque fail to show up, Barbers said, “there is a saying in law—flight is indicative of guilt.”

“Roque should produce those documents; otherwise, there might be a different conclusion by the committee members. He promised to show them to us,” Barbers also said.

On how long the quad committee plans to conduct its inquiry, he said it has already passed the 50% mark of the issues to be substantiated after five hearings. “We want to complete whatever needs to be substantiated so we can do our committee report,” he said.

The post Barbers on Roque: ‘What goes around comes around’ appeared first on CoverStory.

It seems to be a defining feature of presidents: Who do they arrest and what would the arrest mean for their reign?

But over the past few days our notions of what an arrest should look like were challenged, with the persons involved unintentionally reminding us of something that we’ve known all along—that politics is a grand spectacle and we are only too willing to believe it.

When Alice Guo was seen smiling in photographs with the arresting agents of the National Bureau of Investigation and, later, sandwiched between the giddy smiles of Interior Secretary Benhur Abalos and Philippine National Police (PNP) chief Gen. Rommel Marbil, it felt more like an unmasking of every villain in the room than the usual PR stunt that Filipino politicians so often do. No surprise there. The joke has always been on us.

To save face in the resulting backlash, Abalos and his cohorts would go on social media to detail a supposedly painstaking process of bringing back the dismissed mayor of Bamban, Tarlac, from Indonesia. The President would neutralize the smiling selfies with a euphemism, that we’re “the selfie capital of the world”—so akin to his mother’s past curating of perceptions. Alice Guo would proceed with her antics at the Sept. 9 Senate hearing, refusing to give any sincere answer, and even denying the inquiry of an unequivocal answer as to what her name is. 

And, as if in some magician’s spell, Abalos and the PNP couldn’t make Quiboloy show his face at the press conference formally announcing his arrest and also blurred his mug shots.

All this is so very different from past high-profile arrests where helicopters were employed to watch over Estrada’s house in San Juan as the warrant was served, where Arroyo in a neck brace and on a wheelchair attempted to fly out of the Philippines, and where De Lima faced the police and the media unashamed at her Senate office. In the narrative of capturing Public Enemies No. 1, we have arrived at a crossroads where we’re supposed to ask: What exactly should we feel with these arrests?

Sense of justice

In various periods and societies, prison serves as the most tangible representation of the existence of a moral code and a sense of justice. It draws the line between the law-abiding, normal, and boring citizens and those who do “wrong,” whatever “wrong” might mean to this or that set of mortals. This is why in our history, prison has always been tricky ground: Is it a place where criminals end up? Or a place where good people land for attempting to go against the great powers that lord over us?

In Jose Rizal’s novels, there is no shortage of arguably good prisoners: Tarsilo, the protagonist Crisostomo Ibarra himself, and the mythological giant Bernardo Carpio, chained to a cliff. In Juan Luna’s colossal Spoliarium, we look at the corpses of once-valiant gladiators, prisoners in a way, being dragged to the abyss. Those who believed in and fought for democracy during the regime of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. were all likely to end up in prison for various degrees of doing good. Even in the 2022 election ads of De Lima—now cleared of all the drug charges against her—at the center was the idea of good and simple Filipinos being imprisoned in bad governance, in poverty, and in the fear that Duterte so regularly conjured with the extrajudicial killings that occurred during his term. With a PNP that appears to be in the same mold as the guwardiya sibil, it’s no mystery how the business of the Bureau of Corrections could still sound moronic.

Make no mistake, however, in thinking that the police are toothless and incapable of applying force. For decades now, it has been clear how citizens who are not as well-known as Alice Guo or Apollo Quiboloy would normally be manhandled by the police for much lesser offenses. Authorities would even go way out of their way and tap the anticommunist task force to file dummy cases against religious persons, nongovernment workers, and the like, just to make the lives of the already suffering more difficult. There are still hundreds of political prisoners and disappeared persons.

Lest we forget, the baby River Nasino’s funeral in October 2020 was a gruesome show of force in the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic. Though no one was killed on that day and the burial was for a 3-month-old baby, the show put up by the hundreds of heavily armed police officers guarding her mother, the then-imprisoned activist Reina Mae Nasino, felt more nauseating than watching Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. (Reina Mae was acquitted in July 2023 of charges of illegal possession of firearms and explosives.)

It is clear that, in this country, the ones who benefit the most from imprisoning people are the police. It reinforces the illusion that they are in the service of good and allows them to shape a narrative wherein their use of force is governed, supposedly, by the people’s sense of right and wrong and, just as much, the people’s sense of justice. Unlike extrajudicial killings and other impulses by policemen holding guns, lawful arrests paint a direct relationship between the police and a thinking, moral state.

Remember Pharmally

This makes me wonder if there’s really any point in arresting those who would almost surely even enjoy privileged accommodations. When the scandal involving Pharmally Pharmaceutical Corp. blew up and the Dargani siblings were detained in August 2021, it wasn’t too difficult to imagine them being fed three times a day in a cell at the Senate—especially when they were captured trying to exit the Philippines through Davao International Airport—during a time when so many Filipinos could hardly feed themselves.

We need not go far and consider the case of Duterte. If he is ever arrested on whatever charge, he who increased the salaries of policemen to unprecedented amounts and is so loved by the institution would most certainly bask in the pleasures of Camp Crame or, as in Estrada’s case, in a resthouse in Tanay. Should he be arrested by the International Criminal Court, he probably won’t live long enough, anyway, and could even enjoy better health care in a prison cell abroad.

This is why it’s weird to take these recent arrests seriously, with or without Abalos and the PNP chief smiling with their prisoner. I take these worldly events with a grain of salt, what with our government’s rich history of arrests, imprisonments, and everyday malformation of the idea of liberty.

One of the many reasons I remain a practicing Catholic is the belief that in imagining Heaven and Hell, we can’t even begin to understand how God made them to be like. In my attempt at informing myself of a possible Hell, I do not discount the prospect of a prison of souls that exists, at the same time, here on Earth and down below. Where corrupt leaders—many of them still happily dancing today—feed their bone marrow to the devil every day.

DLS Pineda is an assistant professor at the Department of English and Comparative Literature-College of Arts and Letters, University of the Philippines Diliman.

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In an interview with CoverStory, Pimentel raised the need for the President to “designate” an anti-Pogo czar so that there will be “someone in charge” and to institute “command responsibility” in the job of banishing the gaming hubs from the country.

Asked if he had anyone in mind for the job, he said it should be “someone like Sen. Risa Hontiveros or Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian.” He described the two lawmakers as “genuinely and seriously against Pogo, are willing to devote time and energy to the ‘cause,’ and do not easily give up.”

Hontiveros chairs the Senate committee on women, children, family relations and gender equality which is currently investigating illegal Pogos in the country. She and Gatchalian are reported to have received threats on their lives for their ongoing inquiry. 

During his third State of the Nation Address last month, Mr. Marcos ordered authorities to wind down the operations of Pogo hubs in the country by the end of the year, saying that “their operations have ventured into illicit areas farthest from gaming, such as financial scamming, money laundering, prostitution, human trafficking, kidnapping, brutal torture, even murder.”

“The grave abuse and disrespect to our system of laws must stop,” he said, eliciting a standing ovation from members of Congress and other government officials.

Pagcor 

In charge of enforcing the presidential directive is the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. (Pagcor) chaired by Alejandro Tengco. Earlier, Tengco said there were only 42 legal Pogos—rebranded as “internet gaming licensees (IGLs)”—that his office would shut down by the end of the year.

Pimentel had threatened to push for Pagcor’s abolition if it fails to comply with Mr. Marcos’ directive on Pogos. But he told CoverStory: “So far, all indicators show that Pagcor will comply with the President’s very clear and categorical directive and order.”

“Should the direction of the wind change all of a sudden, then I will be ready to call out such disobedience and disrespect coming from the underlings of the President,” he said, adding they have “no right and power to undermine the decision” of Mr. Marcos.

Told that government agencies led by the Department of Justice recently met to coordinate efforts to enforce the Pogo ban policy, the opposition senator said this was a “good start” and that there was now “clarity on how to address” the ban. This also “puts an end to all doubts on whether Pogos should be allowed in the country,” he said.

“As for the government response, so far so good,” he added, and reiterated his support for the administration on this effort.

To ensure that the ban is put firmly in place, Pimentel said, the government should “pay attention to the details” and “coordinate its actions” apart from assigning an anti-Pogo czar for command responsibility. He also said it would be “wise” for Congress to come up with legislation “which gives the ban a permanent character.”

“Such legislation should [penalize] the establishment of Pogos as well as associated acts. We should also address numerous loopholes in our existing laws, like strengthening our laws governing the delayed registration of births, among others,” he said.

There are now two bills in the Senate seeking to repeal the law taxing Pogos in an effort to outlaw the gambling hubs. Sen. Joel Villanueva filed a measure shortly after the President announced the ban on the gaming hubs; Gatchalian filed the same bill as early as May because of the increasing number of Pogo-related crimes.

Alice Guo

Asked how the government could respond to doubts that the ban would be enforced given the way Pogos have supposedly entrenched themselves under the sponsorship of local officials, as now being alleged against Mayor Alice Guo of Bamban, Tarlac, Pimentel said he was “sure” the ban would be carried out “with political will, discipline in the bureaucracy, and clear spheres of responsibilities.”

“The Office of the President should be ready to sanction and punish those who disobey the policy, including local government officials,” he said. 

Guo, who has a standing arrest warrant for skipping the Senate hearings, is being investigated for her alleged links to Zun Yuan Technology, the raided Pogo hub in Bamban. 

The mayor’s Filipino citizenship has been questioned in the Senate inquiry, with the National Bureau of Investigation saying that her fingerprints matched that of Guo Hua Ping, a Chinese national who entered the country in 2003. The mayor’s birth was registered only in 2013, or 17 years after she was supposedly born in 1986.

Harry Roque

On the revelations that have emerged from the ongoing Senate inquiry, including the possible Pogo links of Harry Roque, the spokesperson of then President Rodrigo Duterte, Pimentel said he “applaud[s]” Hontiveros for the “hard work” in investigating Pogos. He also said he was “eagerly awaiting” the release of the committee report and added that its findings “must be used to guide future actions.”

“Atty. Harry Roque is a competent lawyer; he can defend himself and explain why his name is cropping up,” Pimentel said. 

Roque and 11 other “persons of interest” in the Pogo hub in Porac, Pampanga, are now under an immigration lookout bulletin order.

Justice Secretary Jesus Crispin Remulla ordered the Bureau of Immigration to monitor the itineraries, travel, and whereabouts of Roque and the 11 other persons in relation to the cases against illegal Pogo incorporators and corporate officers of Lucky South 99 and Whirlwind Corp.

In a statement to the media, Roque said the immigration lookout order issued against him was “plain harassment” and a “political witch hunt intended to silence me as a critic of this administration.”

He said he has no reason to leave the country and will face his accusers and answer allegations against him.

Roque said the only pieces of evidence authorities had on him was his accompanying Katherine Cassandra Li Ong to Pagcor’s Tengco for “rescheduling of arrears payment” and “an uncorroborated organizational chart” which named him as in charge of legal matters. He had “no participation in preparing” the chart, he said, adding: “Neither did I consent to my name’s inclusion.”

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