Bangkok: An Australian accused of providing money, mobile telephones and free education to Filipino teenagers in exchange for sex, claims he has been set-up by a former girlfriend.
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"I did not do nothing," 61-year-old Michael Refalo, a former construction worker, told journalists as he was escorted out of a press conference on the island of Cebu, in the Philippines, on Thursday.
"The allegations were spread by my ex-girlfriend," he said.
Police have charged Refalo with two charges of human trafficking in relation to allegations that he exploited 14 Filipino girls aged 14 to 18.
Refalo, who has lived in the Philippines for six years, said his former girlfriend was living with another man at the time of the alleged offences, adding "she has an agenda".
The allegations against Refalo were lodged by the International Justice Mission, which said in a report that neighbours first reported seeing girls coming to his house in the town of Santa Fe in 2013.
"They came forward and confirmed that young girls even in their school uniforms are going to the house of Refalo or [he] sometimes rode with them on his bike," the report said.
"He let them use his computer and internet and gave them food and mobile phones so they would keep coming to his house," it said.
One of the alleged victims had been taken into care at a government centre.
Cebu vice-governor Agnes Magpale told reporters that only two alleged victims had been located by the International Justice Mission and their parents were not co-operating because they were getting financial assistance from Refalo.
"Stop exploiting women and children," she told the press conference.
Refalo had been running an internet cafe in Santa Fe, police said.
He was arrested on Wednesday at an internet cafe on a Camotes island east of the island of Cebu, four weeks after former Melbourne private school teacher Hilton Reece Munro, 46, hanged himself in a Cebu jail while awaiting trial over the alleged sex abuse of four Filipino boys as young as nine.
Philippines investigators have identified Cebu as the hub of a billion-dollar cyber-sex industry where children, including toddlers, are forced to perform sex acts that are streamed online to paedophiles around the world.
In March, allegations against Melbourne man Peter Gerard Scully, 52, prompted calls for the Philippines to reintroduce the death penalty. Scully is in a Philippines jail facing life imprisonment on charges of sexually abusing 11 children aged between 18 months and 13 years and the murder of one of his alleged victims, a 13-year-old girl he allegedly strangled.
Police described Scully's alleged crimes as the worst they had seen in the Philippines in decades.
Last year, Victorian man Patrick Ronald Goggins, a 68-year-old Vietnam war veteran, was jailed for more than 11 years by a Melbourne court for paying four sisters aged between five and 15 years from Cebu to perform a range of sickening sex acts in front of a webcam.
Human trafficking in the Philippines is a non-bailable offence. A trial date has not been set.
