US hip-hop star Chris Brown partied in Macau with a gold-toothed grin, as officials yesterday said he had left his promoter in a Philippine jail facing a legal dispute with a powerful religious sect.
The 26-year-old left Manila airport on board a Gulf Stream jet late on Friday as immigration police arrested his promoter, John Michael Pio Roda, for fraud, immigration bureau spokeswoman Elaine Tan said.
Brown had been barred from leaving the Philippines for three days after the politically connected Christian group Iglesia ni Cristo filed the fraud complaint against him and his promoter Roda.
Photo: AP
The group said it was owed a million-dollar-plus refund after he failed to show up for a New Year’s Eve concert sponsored by them last year.
However, Brown secured an emigration clearance certificate on Friday and immediately flew to Macau to host a party dubbed “Girls Night Out.”
“Yo Manila, we love y’all, but Macau is poppin.’ We’re in a Rolls Royce baby,” Brown said in a video posted on his Instagram account.
“We made it,” one of his companions blurted, in an apparent reference to Brown’s Manila ordeal.
Brown’s gold-plated teeth shimmered in the two videos taken on the backseat of his limousine and in his Macau hotel room.
“My room got a … video game system. This is crazy!” Brown said, as he showed off two giant video screens and a mini-bar in his suite.
The tattooed and pierced star said on Twitter that he planned to perform in Hong Kong yesterday.
Roda, a Canadian national, is to be detained in Manila until the Philippine Bureau of Immigration resolves his deportation case for fraud in connection with the Iglesia case and working in the country without a permit, Tan said.
The deportation proceeding is separate from the criminal complaint filed at the justice department, which will determine whether charges will be filed in court, she said.
“Chris Brown was allowed to leave because he had no derogatory record and there was no warrant of arrest against him,” she said.
Philippine Department of Justice officials did not return calls seeking comment on the status of the criminal complaint against Brown.
Brown left Manila on Friday after posting bizarre videos on social media, backflipping and spewing profanity as he begged Philippine authorities to let him leave.
Brown’s ordeal almost cost him his world tour, which includes stops in Israel, Cyprus and the Netherlands.
NO EXCUSES: Marcos said his administration was acting on voters’ demands, but an academic said the move was emotionally motivated after a poor midterm showing Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday sought the resignation of all his Cabinet secretaries, in a move seen as an attempt to reset the political agenda and assert his authority over the second half of his single six-year term. The order came after the president’s allies failed to win a majority of Senate seats contested in the 12 polls on Monday last week, leaving Marcos facing a divided political and legislative landscape that could thwart his attempts to have an ally succeed him in 2028. “He’s talking to the people, trying to salvage whatever political capital he has left. I think it’s
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
‘A THREAT’: Guyanese President Irfan Ali called on Venezuela to follow international court rulings over the region, whose border Guyana says was ratified back in 1899 Misael Zapara said he would vote in Venezuela’s first elections yesterday for the territory of Essequibo, despite living more than 100km away from the oil-rich Guyana-administered region. Both countries lay claim to Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens. Guyana has administered the region for decades. The centuries-old dispute has intensified since ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil deposits a decade ago, giving Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world. Venezuela would elect a governor, eight National Assembly deputies and regional councilors in a newly created constituency for the 160,000
RSS