A marketing executive central to Manchester City’s sponsorship agreement with 8XBet was, just months earlier, working with a politically-connected Chinese businessman accused in the International Criminal Court of running Filipino meth labs.
By Jack Kerr, Philippe Auclair, Andy Brown, Steve Menary and Sam Kunti, with Nathan Southern and Lindsey Kennedy in the Philippines
It’s the last Tuesday of November 2021, at a WeWork in London’s Covent Garden, and Jessica* is preparing to spend the afternoon with a football legend. It’s the highlight of a trip full of them. She’ll spend much of her time in London dining at Michelin-starred restaurants and “sinfully” eating oysters and lobster. She’ll even get one of the best seats in the house at Vicarage Road, almost right behind the bench of newly beloved Manchester City (she used to support United).
But her trip to London is really about one thing: an advertising shoot on Southwark St. The job is a “brand ambassador” signing at the Menier Penthouse, crewed by local PR firm Square In The Air. The view across the Thames is to die for, though the real star of the show is Teddy Sheringham.
A pre-shoot Zoom call with Teddy Sheringham and his manager, Josh Landy (Bear Face Talent), plus others
The man who played a pivotal role in United’s treble winning-season all those years ago has agreed to promote a company with very little profile, very deep pockets and, as Josimar has revealed over the past 12 months, a very colourful backstory, including a connection to a Cambodian “cyber slavery” compound.
For Jessica, however, a deal with Teddy Sheringham is just the entree. The best is yet to come. “After 4 months of hard work, frustrations and stress,” she writes on Facebook a few months later, “I’m proud to announce the partnership with Manchester City.”
Manchester City. The Champions of English football. Soon to be the kings of Europe. For a marketing executive like Jessica – a director of QOO Global, the mysterious Dubai-based firm behind 8XBet – it doesn’t get much bigger than that.
The last few years really have been a whirlwind for Jessica. For more than a decade, her career had been in real estate, beginning in her home country of Singapore and then shifting to the Philippines, as her LinkedIn profile shows.
It was there, in mid 2020, that she took up a role as personal assistant to the vice-chairman of Paili Holdings. For six months, she worked diligently in the company’s Manila office.
Jessica posts from the Paili Christmas party. The logo seen on the TV screens matches one in the WIPO database for a Paili Estate Group Corporation. According to an SEC filing seen by Rappler, this is a rebranded version of Michael Yang’s Paili Holdings.
Then, in the early stages of the pandemic, she transferred to Dubai, where her career took an unexpected turn.
“Provided expert guidance to gaming clients looking to shift operations to Dubai,” her LinkedIn profile reveals of her work with Paili, which lasted six months in Dubai before she switched over to QOO Global and got it off the ground. “Offering strategic insights and tailored solutions to facilitate a seamless transition and maximise business opportunities in the region.”
It seems like an odd workload for a real estate company employee, but then Paili is so much more than that. As Rappler reported in 2021, Paili is co-directed by Michael Yang: also known as Hongming Yang, he is a former presidential economic advisor to Rodrigo Duterte, the hardman Filipino president, who has publicly defended Yang’s reputation on multiple occasions.
In September 2021, an arrest warrant was issued for Yang for contempt, after he failed to appear before a senate hearing into the Pharmally scandal, in which a company run by associates of Yang were accused of selling medical supplies at inflated prices to the government during the pandemic. Duterte downplayed Yang’s involvement, describing him as merely the “paymaster” or “financial sponsor” of the company. (Yang did subsequently front up to be questioned.)
Two months later, reports emerged that the International Criminal Court had also been talking about Yang.
According to a 186-page affidavit seen by Rappler and the OCCRP, Yang was accused of running meth labs in Mindanao in the early 2000s. Mindanao is where Duterte made his name as a hard-man political leader, and the ICC investigation was looking into the thousands of killings that took place during his presidency, as part of a “war on drugs”.
The affidavit – produced by a member of the vigilante Davao Death Squad – was described by the OCCRP as the “first independent corroboration” of similar claims made in a 2017 intelligence report produced by a former narcotics agent.
“This Michael Yang who is alleged to be a drug addict … the ambassador of China sleeps in his house, and he was part of the Premier’s entourage,” Duterte was quoted as saying when the earlier allegations were raised. It speaks to Yang’s influence on both sides of the South China Sea.
Yang’s name has also come up in relation to gambling and human rights abuses in the Philippines.
In 2020, a 23-year-old woman who worked for a Philippines offshore gaming operator (or POGO) told the Senate she was kept like a slave, removed from her passport, unable to escape and subjected to physical and sexual abuse.
“There is a very powerful government [person] called Michael Yang,” she is reported saying. “I heard about once or twice from my boss, saying they have a government person supporting their business.
“They get mad at me, or sometimes they mention Michael Yang, but I don’t know who is he.”
Yang has also been described as “allegedly the real power” behind the POGO Xionwei Technology, which the chief of the country’s Anti-Kidnapping Group accused of involvement in five such incidents last year. The workers were Chinese and wanted to return home, but were forced to stay, against their will.
“I can affirm that, apart from Jessica having been a former employee of Paili Holdings, Qoo Global and 8Xbet have no association with Paili Holdings or Michael Yang,” a spokesperson for QOO Global said.
Manchester City, Teddy Sheringham, Bear Face Talent and Square In The Air were all contacted for interviews.
Tower 6789
In December 2023, the United Kingdom announced sanctions against ZhengHeng Group, a Cambodian company that operated “cyber slave” compounds – where people are lured on the promise of good work, then subjected to escalating labour rights abuses until they find themselves held against their will and forced to carry out online scams and gambling work.
One of ZhengHeng’s operations is the Heng He Casino in the Cambodian border town of Bavet, where, as Josimar reported earlier this year, a recruitment company called Great Wall was hiring workers for 8XBet. Multiple points of open-source intelligence demonstrate the connection between Great Wall and 8XBet appeared legitimate.
But even before that story had been written, Great Wall seemed to have gone quiet. It no longer seems to be operating in Bavet (even if other companies are). So where could 8XBet’s recruiters have gone?
One contact in Cambodia pointed to the Philippines. Others noted a trend of companies that left that country in the early stages of the pandemic, when crackdowns against POGOs were also taking place, were now returning there. Given the connections of Jessica – and many other early hires at QOO Global – to the Philippines, it certainly seemed like the place to look.
Clark Majestic World, a compound built by Paili in one of the Philippines’ “free zones”, was where we began. This locked and gated compound is supposed to be a mixed-use development, with apartments, restaurants, malls, salons, and dormitory accommodation. When we visited in November, the place seemed practically deserted. A security guard said it had been empty since the previous December – around the same time Great Wall went quiet. Police came by now and again to check that nothing bad was going on, they said.
Bad things certainly have gone on. In May 2022, Philippines police arrested two Chinese residents living in the condos part of this compound. They were charged with kidnapping a young Vietnamese woman, a customer service agent at an online gaming company, from her workplace at a skyscraper in Manila, then holding her for ransom on the sixth floor of Clark Majestic World.
Kidnappings like these are so common in the shady online betting world in the Philippines that the head of security at the building she was taken from in downtown Manila, PBcom (co-owned by the country’s biggest bank of the same name), told us that his team doesn’t even keep incident reports on them.
But while we knew online gaming companies were, or had been, based in both buildings, we didn’t know if 8xBet was one of them. Staff at PBcom said they couldn’t answer that, and the security guard at Clark Majestic World claimed he’d never heard of them.
With no luck, we returned to the Facebook groups where the 8XBet-linked recruiter had posted ads in 2022. Some of these forums – like one specifically for workers in Dubai, Manila and the Cambodian bordertown of Bavet – seemed to make no sense outside of the context of 8XBet: these three random locations were leading points of activity for the ghostly bookmaker.
Recent ads in the forum showed massive call-centre-like offices in need of employees, with two locations in Manila consistently mentioned.
One of these locations was Tower 6789 in the heart of Manila’s financial district. It was a name that immediately stood out – there are a number of gambling brands connected to 8XBet with similar numeric titles, like 6686.com, 678.hk and 8868.com.
It was a search that led us to an anonymous post on Facebook from just a few weeks earlier. It translated to: “I want to ask, has anyone ever worked at 8xbet, building 6789, floor 34? Give me some reviews please.”
With 35 floors, this was just one from the top.
Tower 6789 is just a few buildings along from PBCom. It is also a well-known online gaming hub, although staff on the reception desk couldn’t find 8XBet listed as a tenant. This doesn’t mean they aren’t there, as many companies go under the radar by subletting from officially registered gambling operators and using access passes with their branding.
We couldn’t get to the 34th floor, but we were able to access some empty floors available to rent in Tower 6789, some of which were set up for online gambling companies.
A real estate agent handling the building said many companies here moved to Dubai during the COVID-19 lockdown – which fits the timeline of QOO Global – but a lot were now coming back.
However, a person describing themselves as a recruiter for gambling companies in the 6789 buildings, who we contacted over Telegram, claimed 8XBet wasn’t in this tower. It was, they said, based in Vietnam.
Then again, maybe he would say that.
*her name has been changed to protect her privacy
This article was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe.
