CAGAYAN DE ORO CITY (MindaNews / 25 Sept)—When he arrived in Manila in 1998 or 1999 from mainland China, suspected POGO financier Tony Yang or Yang Jianxin said that he moved to this city six months later, he revealed during a Senate hearing on Tuesday.
Tony Yang at the Senate. Photo: Senate Social Media Unit
Yang, the older brother of former President Rodrigo Duterte’s adviser Michael Yang, told the hearing led by Senator Risa Hontiveros that his grandfather told him to go and help a relative who was in a textile business in Cagayan de Oro City, a developing urban center at that time.
Speaking through an interpreter, he said his grandfather, whom he did not identify, gave him P800,000 that he could use as business investment in Cagayan de Oro.
Twenty-five years later, Hontiveros said Yang owned an P800-million steel manufacturing plant in neighboring Misamis Oriental, a POGO center in a posh subdivision in Cagayan de Oro, and a lucrative rice trading business.
The senator said Yang, who also has a Philippine birth certificate in the name of Antonio Maestrado Lim, has several business companies registered in the Securities and Exchange Commission office in Cagayan de Oro under his Filipino name.
“For 25 years Yang used his different fictitious names to make money from this country,” Hontiveros said at the Senate hearing.
She said Yang was also the owner and majority stock holder of Oroone Inc., a registered service provider of a Philippine offshore gaming operator.
The Cagayan de Oro City Council on April 3, 2017, passed Resolution no. 12660-2017 allowing the operation of Oroone Inc. at the Alwana Business Park in Barangay Cugman.
Yang denied he was the owner of Oroone Inc., saying he was only a dummy at the behest of its real owner who rented his building in Alwana Business Park.
Councilor Romeo Calizo said he sponsored a resolution in 2022 calling for a police inspection of the facility but nothing came out of it.
Hontiveros, during the Tuesday hearing, showed pictures of police officers in Cagayan de Oro posing with Yang. Asked if these officers were his friend, Yang said he knew some of the police officers, including then Region 10 police director Benjamin Acorda Jr., who later on became Philippine National Police chief.
“Yang is very generous to everyone, especially the police officers,” Councilor George Goking told a local radio station Tuesday.
Col. Salvador Radam, city police director, said a police team that inspected Oroone Inc. facilities in Alwana Business Park last week found it empty except for tables and chairs left behind by its occupants.
The Philippine Anti-Organized Crime Commission said they found Philippine Sanjia Steel Corporation operating at the minimum of 300 workers who are mostly from mainland China. The agency said at its heyday, the steel firm had about 2,000 Chinese workers at its plant at the 3,000-hectare Phividec industrial estate in Villanueva, Misamis Oriental.
Yang said during the Senate hearing, only 100 Filipino workers are hired because they have to learn how to operate the sophisticated machinery at the plant.
He said they preferred hiring Filipino workers because of their low-salary scale compared to workers from mainland China whom they have to pay plane tickets, offer board and lodging and command a higher pay scale. (Froilan Gallardo / MindaNews)
