(Done in partnership with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project)
Michael Yang, the former presidential economic adviser of Rodrigo Duterte, co-owned a multi-million-dollar property in Dubai which was acquired by his business partner Lin Weixiong in 2021. This was just a year after their company, Pharmally Pharmaceutical, won as much as P7.49 billion ($155 million)* in “irregular” pandemic projects in 2020 as the Duterte government’s most favored contractor.
A joint investigation by Rappler and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) found that 46-year-old Lin acquired two Dubai properties in 2021 worth a total of P1.04 billion or $21 million.
One of these properties was co-owned by Yang, who admitted to being a guarantor for Pharmally back then. Senators believe Yang, now 48, was its financier. (READ: TIMELINE: Michael Yang and Lin Weixiong’s Philippine enterprise)
Information we found through a leaked dataset of Dubai property owners give us an idea of how these questionable Chinese businessmen used millions of dollars offshore, immediately after earning proportionate amounts by supplying government critical equipment during the raging pandemic, with some deliveries flagged for being delayed and substandard.
In May 2024, the Office of the Ombudsman added Lin in its updated indictment, identifying him as the financial manager of Pharmally and accusing him of using the firm as a “dummy.” Lin now faces three counts of graft, alongside Pharmally owners and officers, and Duterte’s former budget executives who, according to the indictment, “irregularly awarded procurement contracts” to them.
Both Yang and Lin already left the country last May 2024 — travel records indicated — after the Ombudsman issued its indictment. Lin spent some time in the Philippines, in Dubai and in Georgia from 2021 and the years until then, according to the statements and social media posts of his wife, Rose Nono Lin. Similar information on Yang could not be ascertained.
That Michael Yang was not included in the indictment, even in its first version in August 2023, has frustrated some senators who spent half a year holding hearings on the procurement mess. In August 2023 when Lin was still also not indicted, the chairperson of the investigating panel, former senator Richard Gordon, told ABS-CBN News: “How come there’s no mention of Michael Yang, how come there’s no mention of Lin Weixiong who went off to Dubai and was given a power of attorney by the corporation to withdraw the money, and he probably has withdrawn the money and taken it abroad.”
Rappler has asked Ombudsman Samuel Martires for comment, but he has yet to respond to our messages sent on October 24 and 26. Ace Barbers, chairperson of the House quad committee that’s also now investigating Yang, told Rappler: “I believe [Yang should be indicted.] He’s a principal figure in the questionable Pharmally deal.”
The Senate report published in February 2022 recommended the same charges — even plunder — against Yang, whom they found to have only started paying taxes in 2018 despite being in the Philippines since 1999.
“Mr. Yang appears unfazed by his own acts and omissions, exposing him to Philippine laws against deportation, false testimony, plunder, and evasion of the timely and proper payment of taxes — a hubris borne out of his closeness to the president (Duterte) himself,” said the Senate blue ribbon committee report. We asked the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) if an investigation on Yang has been opened, but the bureau has not gotten back to us after acknowledging our query on October 28.
Yang’s lawyer Raymond Fortun acknowledged the request for comment we sent on October 30, and said he would forward our queries to Yang. We followed up again on November 4, but were told on Tuesday, November 5, that he has yet to receive a reply from his client. We also emailed Lin’s wife, Rose Nono Lin, in the email addresses listed in her certificate of candidacy and active Facebook page on October 29 and 31, but we have not received a response. We will update this story once they reply.
Lin and Yang were previously named in an intelligence report as allegedly having links to the drug trade, a dossier that Duterte supposedly ignored, at least according to former police anti-drug operative Eduardo Acierto, who’s still in hiding, fearful that his revelations have put his life at risk. Rose Nono Lin denied in the Senate in 2021 that her husband is the same person tagged in the Acierto report.
The information on the Dubai properties of Lin and Yang came from a new data leak to OCCRP that adds to the cross-border investigation on how the world’s criminals, kleptocrats, and other sanctioned individuals have stashed their money in Dubai real estate. “Dubai’s high-rises and villas have served as a safe haven for some of the world’s most wanted criminals, due in part to the secrecy its real estate sector affords,” wrote the OCCRP in May.
From Pharmally to Dubai
By the end of 2020, the undercapitalized Pharmally had copped net sales amounting to P7.4 billion or $155 million based on the average exchange rate that year. Lin had full access to this money, as prosecutors said he could “deposit, withdraw…and access credit facilities.”
“After all, Pharmally can be regarded as [Lin’s] dummy under the law. Under these circumstances, a reasonable mind could not be faulted from entertaining a well-grounded belief that Lin was deeply involved in the irregular scheme, conspiring with all other officials of PS-DBM and Pharmally,” read the updated indictment issued in May 2024.
With control over what had become the multi-million dollar Pharmally, Lin bought property at Al Thanayah Fourth in Emirates Hills in May 2021 for 60 million AED or $16 million (P804 million). Emirates Hills or the “Beverly Hills of Dubai” is a luxury residential estate with posh villas and a golf course.
Lin’s travel records show he traveled to Dubai in February and April in 2021, or a month before the recorded date of purchase of the property in Al Thanayah Fourth. Lin left the country in May 2024 after the Ombudsman issued its indictment, and went to Hong Kong, Rappler verified through travel records in the justice department.
Other questionable personalities have properties in Emirates Hills, too. In Al Thanayah Fourth specifically, a former Nigerian government official sacked for corruption also owns expensive property, as reported by Economy Post.
In Emirates Hills, there’s also property that belongs to Lin Baoying, Alice Guo’s co-incorporator in the Baofu compound in Bamban, Tarlac. Both Guo and Lin Baoying are charged with human trafficking over the operations of an illegal POGO (Philippine offshore gaming operators) hub there, but only Guo has been detained.
Lin Baoying left the country when the scandal was just beginning to blow up, and she was eventually arrested in 2023 in Singapore for money laundering. Lin Baoying has served her sentence in Singapore, and has since been deported to Cambodia. She bought the Emirates Hills property in March 2022.
The same Dubai dataset of property owners showed that Lin and Yang sold this same multimillion-dollar property in October 2022 for 85 million AED or $23 million, equivalent to P1.2 billion based on the average exchange rate that year. This suggests that Yang became a co-owner of this property after Lin purchased it in 2021, and that they made a hefty 25 million AED ($6.8 million or P370 million) profit from this sale.
Yang also traveled to Dubai in February and April 2021, within days of Lin, according to immigration records submitted to the Senate. Yang last left the country in May 2024 for Dubai, Rappler verified through his travel records in the justice department.
One company in the Lin-Yang network of businesses is engaged precisely in real estate investments. That company is Paili Estate, which, when it incorporated in April 2018, had a subscribed capital of only P2.5 million, of which only P625,000 was paid-up. Even if based on the subscribed capital, that’s only $43,614 put up by its incorporators, which include Michael Yang, his brother Hongjiang Yang, and others.
But come yearend 2022, or after the Dubai resale, Paili Estate was able to acquire over a billion pesos (or $19.3 million) worth of assets, financial statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) showed.
As of 2024, Lin Weixiong is 20% owner of Paili Estate, Michael Yang is 9.8% owner, and Lin’s 41-year-old wife, Rose Nono Lin, is the president and listed beneficial owner, according to SEC records.
Lin Weixiong: His POGO and his politician wife
Born in 1978 in Fujian, China, Lin Weixiong has both Hong Kong and Chinese passports. His recent Chinese passport, which was issued in 2011 from Manila, expired in 2021. The indictment versus Pharmally also says Lin “declared himself to be a Chinese citizen.”
But in 2018, when the company Xionwei Technology began its commercial operations two years after its incorporation in 2016, Lin Weixiong registered as a Filipino citizen with the SEC as the company’s 1% shareholder.
It was Lin’s wife Rose who incorporated Xionwei in 2016 with four other Filipinos and one Chinese. Lin entered the picture, as far as SEC is concerned, only in 2018.
The year 2018 is consequential because it was also the time that Xionwei got a POGO license, according to its financial statements. In fact, Xionwei’s service provider was a company called Oroone Inc., according to a certificate of accreditation issued by the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation or Pagcor.
Oroone Inc. is based in Cagayan de Oro City and owned by Michael’s eldest brother, Tony Yang, who used his Filipino name Antonio Maestrado Lim when he and other partners incorporated the company in November 2016, when Duterte was already president.
Rose Lin and her partners incorporated Xionwei in 2016 with a capital of P50 million or $1 million. By the end of 2021, Xionwei’s total assets had surged to a whopping P377 million or $7.6 million.
In the same year, in 2021, Lin Weixiong had not only bought and sold the Al Thanayah Fourth property with Michael Yang, he had also bought another villa at the similarly-luxurious District One Phase II Villas in Mohammed Bin Rashid City. Lin bought this property in June 2021 with another person for 17.3 million AED or P232 million ($4.7 million).
By December 2021 when the Senate’s Pharmally hearings were heating up, Lin Weixiong was still in Dubai, according to Rose who showed up in the Senate on her husband’s behalf. “May investment po kami sa Dubai….ang alam ko po nagso-source out po sila sa POGO (We have an investment in Dubai…as far as I know they source out to POGO),” Rose said on December 3, 2021.
“There seems to be laundering in this activity from the proceeds of the Philippine Pharmally deal,” said Barbers.
Before she put her TikTok account on private, Lin’s wife Rose uploaded videos of her, Lin Weixiong himself, and their family enjoying the Christmas and New Year holidays in 2023 up to January 2024 in Dubai — at the Palm Jumeirah, in particular, an artificial group of islets where luxurious hotels, resorts and restaurants stand.
Rose Lin lost her congressional bid in 2022, but will try again in the 2025 midterm elections to be the representative of the 5th District of Quezon City. When she filed her certificate of candidacy on October 7, she refused to answer questions from the media. She is running under the Reform PH party, which was formed by former senator Gringo Honasan and other members of the Magdalo group.
In this network of at least eight interconnected companies, Rose Lin is listed as either incorporator or officer of seven firms. Pharmally is the only company in this network that’s not under her name, although her husband is a financial manager.
Xionwei was the first to incorporate on June 8, 2016 in Davao City, at a time when Rodrigo Duterte was in the same city as president-in-waiting. He took his oath as president 22 days later on June 30.
The rest of the seven companies either amended their articles of incorporation or were incorporated during Duterte’s six-year term.
This Lin-Yang network connects to the Alice Guo POGO enterprise through Hongjiang Yang, brother of Michael and Tony Yang.
Hongjiang and Rose are business partners in two companies that are part of this network — Philippine Full Win Group of Companies and Paili Estate Group Corp. Duterte had visited Full Win’s Xiamen office before, when he was still Davao City mayor in 2015.
According to the Court of Appeals resolution freezing the assets of the Guo-related businesses, Hongjiang has a joint bank account with Yuzheng Can, one of the incorporators of the Hongsheng POGO that was raided in February 2023 inside Alice Guo’s Baofu compound in Bamban, Tarlac.
An earlier Rappler investigation showed that Guo’s business partners in Baofu extend to the transnational scam networks that operated in Cambodia and Hong Kong, and laundered illegal proceeds in Singapore.
Lin and Yang are still active subjects of the ongoing House quad committee investigation, according to Barbers, who said that they “are continuously pursuing both in relation to their connection with the 560 kilos of shabu in a warehouse owned by their associate/partner in other businesses registered with our SEC.” – Rappler.com
Currency conversions were based on the average exchange rate during the period of the purchase or sale, according to a table from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. Exchange rate as of November 5 is 1 US$ = P58.36
For more stories and investigations on POGOs, refer to this page.
