AMLC files criminal complaint vs Philrem execs

MANILA, Philippines - The Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) has filed a third criminal complaint against individuals suspected of involvement in the loss of $80.9 million of Bangladesh funds – this time against executives of remittance firm Philrem Service Corp.

The filing of the complaint with the Department of Justice (DOJ) last Wednesday against Philrem executives came more than a month after the filing of similar charges against dismissed Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. (RCBC) branch manager Maia Santos-Deguito, casino junket operators Kam Sin Wong alias Kim Wong and Weikang Xu, and four others.

Named respondents in the latest 17-page joint complaint were Philrem president Salud Bautista, chairman of the board and treasurer Michael Bautista and anti-money laundering compliance officer Anthony Pelejo.

The council alleged that Philrem was part of a conspiracy to launder the stolen money after investigation showed that a total of $61 million was eventually converted and transferred to Philrem’s peso account in the RCBC-Unimart Greenhills branch.

AMLC said Pelejo submitted a suspicious transaction report (STR) last February indicating that $80,884,641.63 had been remitted to Solaire, Eastern Hawaii and Weikang Xu as instructed by a certain “William Go.”

The council, however, pointed out that Pelejo did not include in the STR the information that Wong had received funds from Philrem.

The AMLC said Philrem had the responsibility to conduct the “know your customer” rule and keep identification records when it dealt with “Go,” the owner of the account to which a large part of the stolen funds was transferred.

“What is highly irregular was that respondent spouses claimed that they were dealing with branch manager Deguito, and not the ‘owner’ of the account, ‘William So Go’,” read the charge sheet.

“It is contrary to business practice that a person would deal in large amounts of money with someone who is not the owner of the account, nor someone who was duly authorized by the owner,” the council stressed.

The AMLC alleged that Philrem actually commingled the stolen funds and acted as “cleaning house,” making it extremely difficult to trace the source and flow of the funds.

It claimed that the Philrem officials were clearly aware that the funds were not legitimate when they deliberately ignored the AMLA requirements to conduct KYC and record keeping of customer information.

“Had they done so, respondent spouses would have personally interviewed the real William Go and discovered that that the latter was not aware of the existence of the RCBC Account Nos. 9016455240 and 9010270206,” the complaint, signed by AMLC deputy director Vencent Salido, said.

The AMLC also noted how the respondents continued to possess more or less $17 million of the stolen funds remitted through their company and failed to account for its alleged delivery to Xu.

The four respondents in the first complaint – Michael Francisco Cruz, Jessie Christopher Lagrosas, Alfred Santos Vergara and Enrico Teodoro Vasquez – were the supposed owners of the bank accounts where the stolen Bangladeshi money went before it ended up in Manila casinos.

The DOJ is set to hear the charges against Deguito, Wong and Xu on May 3. The respondents are expected to submit their formal answer to the charges on the same day.