LAS Piñas City Councilor Mark Anthony Santos has urged the House’s Quad Committee to look into the mysterious death of a Chinese national inside an illegal Philippine Offshore Gambling Operator establishment operating at Vista Mall in 2019.
The illegal POGO operation was reportedly maintained by fugitive Chinese businessman Michael Yang, presidential economic adviser of ex-President Rodrigo Duterte.
Police reports identified the Chinese worker as Yang Kang, 27, who allegedly fell from the sixth floor of the mall, owned by the Villar Group of Companies headed by former Senate president Manny Villar, when the victim reportedly tried to escape the room through a window.
In handcuffs, Yang, an information technology employee, was found sprawled on the floor by a security guard who was conducting a routine inspection on August 8, 2019.
Video footage aired by a television station showed that Yang, who succumbed after a few hours while undergoing treatment at a nearby hospital, was able to remove the window grills from where he’s handcuffed and tried to escape.
A witness named Aquan, 30, a Chinese, told police that he saw Yang inside the conference room while tendering his resignation letter to the manager, Li Yunxiang, alias Mr. Shiba, 30, also a Chinese.
Police considered Shiba, who remains at-large, as the prime suspect who detained and handcuffed the victim inside a room of the shopping mall.
Santos, who earlier filed his candidacy for the city’s lone congressional seat wherein he’d slug out with outgoing Senator Cynthia Villar, recalled that most members of the council approved a resolution when Yang’s company applied for occupational and business permits to operate an on-line gaming hub inside Villar’s mall that year.
However, Santos said, they later discovered that Yang’s businesses inside Villar’s mall were illegally operating after noticing that hundreds of Chinese nationals were already recruited and later involved in prostitution, human trafficking, kidnapping, brutal torture and even murder.
Described by many residents as the ‘David’ who would face the ‘Goliath’ (in reference to the senator) and emerge victorious in the end (after the May 2025 elections), Santos lamented that the city police failed to interrogate mall officials or a single employee about the victim’s mysterious death.