EDITORIAL - Foreign buying spree

In mid-December last year, a congressman had warned that Chinese nationals were buying up land and other real estate properties across the country. Surigao del Norte 2nd District Rep. Robert Ace Barbers described it as a “creeping invasion” and linked the buying spree to Chinese drug trafficking operations. Barbers chairs the House committee on dangerous drugs.

Recently, the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission sounded a similar alert over large-scale land purchases by foreigners. The PAOCC did not identify any particular nationality, but it was responding to concerns raised by a Catholic bishop that foreigners were buying up land in the Palawan municipality of Taytay. PAOCC officials said similar cases have been reported in Nueva Ecija and several other parts of the country, with the foreigners buying mostly farmlands planted to rice.

Apart from stirring concern about the nation’s food security being compromised, the developments raise questions about how foreigners can circumvent the constitutional prohibition against foreign ownership of land in the Philippines. PAOCC officials said some of the foreigners would initially rent or lease the land before offering from P80,000 to P100,000 per hectare to buy the property.

The PAOCC is investigating criminal activities linked to massive Philippine offshore gaming operator hubs that it raided in Bamban, Tarlac and Porac, Pampanga. The POGO in Bamban has 37 buildings; the one in Porac has 46. Each hub occupies a land area of about 10 hectares. Half of the property in Bamban is owned by its suspended mayor, Alice Guo, who says she sold it before running in the 2022 elections. Guo faces ouster as mayor and possible deportation as multiple probes indicate she is a Chinese national who lied about being a Filipino citizen.

PAOCC officials have said they are looking at similar cases involving other POGOs in the country. Barbers said he had received reports that Chinese nationals were able to secure government-issued Philippine IDs or else use Filipino dummies to buy land and register businesses with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Trade and Industry and local government units.

According to Barbers, a Chinese national believed to be behind the shipment of 560 kilos of shabu valued at P3.6 billion in Pampanga in September last year has a company registered with the SEC, owns a gasoline station and managed to buy over four hectares of land in the Pampanga town of Mexico.

Did these things happen because of institutional weaknesses, lapses or corruption? Apart from plugging any loopholes in the system, probers must go after both the foreigners who break Philippine laws and their Filipino enablers.