Philippines uncovers illegal ‘Pogo hospitals’ offering fugitives extreme makeovers

The trove of equipment at the clandestine hospital could transform a person’s appearance to the point of being unrecognisable, PAOCC spokesman Winston John Casio told This Week in Asia.

The commission is now investigating how extensively these underground hospitals are assisting fugitives in assuming fake identities to evade justice.

“They had an operating table, and other aesthetic alteration procedures such as dental implants, hair restoration, facial rejuvenation, and so on,” he said. “If you bring all of these together, you can create an entirely new person out of those.”

Casio said the commission acted on a tip from an informant that an unlicensed hospital was operating on Pasay City’s Macapagal Boulevard as a stand-alone facility.

“We asked our intelligence officers to take a look, and they were able to physically confirm that it existed,” he said.

Acting on the intelligence gathered, the PAOCC enlisted the help of the Bureau of Immigration, which issued a mission order to investigate a Vietnamese national overseeing the clandestine facility’s operations.

“When we went there, we saw an actual operating hospital, a sort of general hospital … they had different types of activities there,” Casio said.

Authorities apprehended two Vietnamese doctors, one Chinese doctor, a Chinese pharmacist, and a Vietnamese nurse – none of whom were licensed to practice medicine in the Philippines as foreign professionals.

Casio said that this was just the first such illegal hospital the PAOCC had raided, with the commission aware of at least two more underground facilities in Metro Manila catering to the Pogo industry.

“We know for a fact that these Pogo hospitals have no licences and permits from the proper government regulatory agencies,” he