Bangladesh Investment

March 17, 2016 at 12:01 am

Jojo Robles/Manila Standard

They say elections always perk up the Philippine economy.

With the timely infusion of one big foreign investment,
theres no way to stop an economic uptick in this election
year, for instance.
Heres the thing: The bulk of the $81 million stolen last
month from the central bank of Bangladesh never left the
Philippines, its becoming increasingly clear; if thats the
case, then where did the money go?
Some gossipy local bankers are claiming that the
Bangladeshi money was never meant to leave the
Philippines in the first place. And that all that moolah will be
used as part of some lucky politicians war chest in the
coming May 9 elections.
The timing of the theft of the Bangladesh foreign reserves,
after all, is suspicious. The four fictitious accounts were
opened in May last year at the RCBC Jupiter, Makati branch
with the bare minimum of $500 each for a dollar account,
only to go dormant for nine months before they suddenly
received the entire amount from four commercial banks in
the USalmost exactly two months before the elections.
The senators who started an investigation of the massive
heist last Tuesday learned that a big portion of the amount,
around P600 million, was physically transferred from the
bank in early February, apparently before local authorities
wised up to the crime. Now, the bankers are saying, who
would require such a huge infusion of cashand why would
it be converted into Philippine pesos if it was going to be
spirited out of the country anyway?
No, the banking folk insist. The money was supposed to stay
here, even if a portion of it had reportedly been spirited

away to some safe haven in Hong Kong, possibly as a

commission to those who pulled off the crime.
The use of huge amounts of money in local elections, of
course, is well-known. The total bill for political advertising
alone in the run-up to this election, for instance, has already
reached many billions of pesos, just for people seeking
national office, this early.
(As one friend quipped, its true that the Bangladeshi money
ended up in casinos. But its not any posh joint run or
overseen by Pagcor, but in the biggest casino of them all
the 2016 elections.)
In the last presidential elections in 2010, for example, there
were rumors that a local politician who died in a vehicular
accident was carrying a huge amount of cash raised by some
shady operators for the campaign kitty of one major
candidate. When rescuers got to the scene of the fatal
accident, they found the bodies, but not the cashwhich
was why the very real grieving that ensued was not limited
to the deceaseds immediate family.
Today, the Senate resumes its investigation of the theft of
Bangladeshi cash (in executive session, away from the
prying eyes of media) through a complicated cyber-operation
that has already been billed as the third biggest bank heist
in history and the largest computer crime ever. I wonder if
the politicians in the Senate will look into the angle that
some of their own kind could have been the beneficiaries of
the robberywhich is right now still being called a moneylaundering operation.
If its true that the Bangladeshi funds were intended to make
some candidate win in May, maybe its time we stopped
calling it that. Its just robbery on a massive scale, to pay for
the ever-escalating cost of getting elected in this country.
***

Speaking of laundering, the Anti-Money Laundering Council,

the government agency tasked to go after those who cleanse
dirty funds through the banking system, deserves no
congratulations in the RCBC case. Not only did the AMLC fail
to stop RCBC from releasing the funds to suspicious
depositors, it was unable to stop the return of the money to
the bank for conversion into pesosway after all sorts of
alarms and stop payment orders had been issued by
authorities here and abroad. AMLC never even knew about
the involvement of the local bank in the huge cyber-heist
until the Bangladesh central bank alerted the Bangko Sentral
ng Pilipinas about the landing of the $81 million in the
Philippines; this, despite the fact that the huge transactions
involving the RCBC four dummy dollar accounts should have
raised enough red flags at the AMLC office to accessorize an
anniversary of the Communist Party of the Philippines.
Of course, we already know what the AMLC has been doing
for the entire term of President Noynoy Aquino: from the
filing of now-dismissed charges against businessman
Roberto Ongpin, the impeachment trial of sacked Chief
Justice Renato Corona to the use of phantom AMLC reports
against Vice President Jejomar Binay, the agency has allowed
itself to be conscripted as just another political weapon in
the terrible arsenal of the administration.
The AMLC is useless when it comes to stopping (or even
investigating) real money-laundering. As a political tool, its
only competition is the Office of the Ombudsman.