Bangladesh may get $15-M stolen funds this month – DOJ

The Bangladesh government may get this month $15 million of the $81-million funds stolen by hackers from its central bank and laundered in the country.

According to the Department of Justice (DOJ), it is now in the process of securing the approval of a Manila regional trial court (RTC) to release the $15 million surrendered by casino junket operator Kim Wong. Wong returned the amount to the government in two tranches – one totaling $4.63 million and the other P488.28 million – after testifying before the Senate inquiry on the money laundering controversy. DOJ chief state counsel Ricardo Paras III said they filed a forfeiture case before the Manila RTC last Aug. 26 in favor of the Bangladeshi government. “The court immediately gave due course to the petition and ruled that it (was) sufficient in form and substance,” Paras said in an interview. Paras said the RTC’s order last Aug. 30 also required the Office of the Solicitor General to comment on the petition. After the OSG files its comment within 15 days as required by the rules, Paras said “we can then expect the court to issue the judgment on the forfeiture” case. The DOJ filed the petition as part of government’s assistance to Bangladesh to recover the stolen funds and after a meeting between Bangladeshi officials led by Ambassador John Gomes and Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre II in August. Gomes said the Philippine government officials gave assurance that the $15 million would be returned after around a month. Apart from the $15 million surrendered by Wong, another $2.7 million was recovered and frozen by the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp., leaving $63 million more from the stolen money missing. Gomes earlier asked the Senate to reopen its investigation on the money laundering case to determine where the rest of the money went. The Senate, however, was cool to the idea, saying the DOJ and other concerned agencies could deal with the recovery of the laundered funds. Also recently, the DOJ concluded its preliminary investigation (PI) on the money laundering charges by the Anti-Money Laundering Council against Wong, former Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. branch manager Maia Santos-Deguito and executives of remittance firm Philrem Service Corp. All respondents have denied money-laundering charges in their respective counter-affidavits during the PI hearings, which lasted four months. Deguito denied facilitating the laundering of the stolen money, insisting that it was former RCBC president Lorenzo Tan who ordered her to open the four fictitious accounts where the $80,884,641.63 stolen by hackers from the Bangladesh Bank went. The former manager of the bank’s Jupiter street branch in Makati City stressed all the transactions in her branch had the approval of Tan, claiming that she was only being used as scapegoat by the bank officials to avoid criminal liabilities. The AMLC, however, spared Tan from the charges filed before the DOJ despite Deguito’s statement.