In 2017, Roque's company Biancham increased its net cash from only 1.5 million pesos to 125 million pesos in cash flow by 2018. Roque attributed this to the sale of family property.
On January 15, 2024, Harry Roque's wife Mira signed a lease agreement with a Chinese woman named Yun Wan for a family property—a house located in Tuba, Benguet Province.
According to Roque, Yun Wan insisted on renting that house, and Duterte invented POGO (Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators) during Roque's term.
Roque said he liked to use the house during holidays, so he initially refused firmly. He eventually gave in.
Six months later, a Chinese fugitive was found living in that house. Roque claimed that Sun Liming was Yun Wan's boyfriend/partner, a red notice fugitive wanted in China for investment fraud through internet marketing, defrauding 180,000 victims of 1.6 billion yuan (12 billion pesos).
The Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission (PAOCC) found that Roque's former executive assistant and student pilot AR dela Serna had lived for a while in the Lucky South 99 POGO compound, a raided scam center revealing traces of trafficking and torture, which brought Roque under closer scrutiny by the POGO investigation than before.
Dela Serna later revealed that it was his relationship with Roque that allowed him to live there for free, and he had a joint bank account with Roque.
Roque has now become a hot figure in the House of Representatives' Quadripartite Committee, so much so that the House is collaborating with the police to arrest him for contempt of court. The House has ordered his detention. The Quadripartite Committee consists of the Committees on Dangerous Drugs, Public Accounts, Public Order and Safety, and Human Rights.
"Philippine National Police personnel are assisting House security personnel in searching for Prosecutor Roque around the clock," House Secretary General Reginald Velasco told Rappler on Monday, September 16.
Roque stated that he would go to the Supreme Court to contest the arrest warrant, telling reporters on September 12: "I will soon submit the appropriate remedies to the Supreme Court. I leave my freedom to the justice department."
The house in Tuba is owned by a company called PH2LOT37 Pinewood Holdings Inc., which in turn is owned by Biancham Holdings and Tradings Inc, named after Roque's children. The capital for founding these two companies was not substantial—Biancham's capital was only 125,300 pesos in 2014, and PH2's capital was only 1 million pesos in 2015. Roque confirmed to the House that the other three founders were nominal shareholders, just to comply with the old rule that there should be five shareholders.
According to the audited financial statements of the two companies obtained by Rappler, the activities of these two companies were minimal, and their financial condition was only between 1 million and 2 million pesos until 2018, when both PH2 and Biancham's cash flows suddenly exceeded 10 million pesos. In 2017, PH2 had only 745,000 pesos in cash, and Biancham had only 1.5 million pesos.
In 2017, Biancham amended its company charter. Initially just a company owning, operating, and engaging in the trade and sale of construction equipment, it primarily became a holding company in 2017, investing in "any and all real and personal property."
The following year, in 2018, PH2's cash flow was 16 million pesos, and Biancham's was 125 million pesos. By the end of 2018, PH2 had 1 million pesos left in cash, and Biancham had 67 million pesos. All this contributed to Roque's wealth, so by 2020, according to his Statement of Assets, Liabilities, and Net Worth (SALN) for that year, his total net worth reached 1.199 billion pesos. This was based on a copy of his filed SALN.
According to his SALN for that year, this amount represented a 21% increase from his net worth of 98.87 million pesos when he joined Duterte's government as a presidential spokesperson in 2017. Under the notice of Ombudsman Samuel Martires, the Duterte government later strictly limited media access to SALN—a practice also adopted by the Marcos government
The period of Roque's wealth growth coincided with the rise of POGO, which began in September 2016 when the Duterte government invented POGO, until 2019 when the Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) noticed a surge in suspicious transactions among casino groups.
After a suspension due to public scrutiny in 2019, POGO flourished again. These "circumstantial evidence" rang alarm bells for the House Quadripartite Committee. "Let the Quadripartite Committee verify where this money came from," Gerville Luistro, representative of the second district of Pateros, said.
At the House hearing on August 22, Roque told Luistro that it was due to the sale of a family property in Multinational Village, Parañaque City, whose residents had complained that their community had become a gambling village operated by Chinese. Roque said it was a 1.8-hectare plot of land that they sold to the Velarde Group for about 216 million pesos, which the Velarde Group then exchanged with the SM Group, and our current 1.8 hectares of land is now an SM warehouse.
