Coming soon: More than P450 million
From questioning by members of the Senate blue ribbon committee the other day, clearly Kim Wong had nothing to do with the biggest electronic bank heist in history.
Kim, a big-time junket operator, was implicated because he hosted people who took part in the $81-million laundered amount, and who paid him or entrusted to him part of the loot.
As he promised to me days before Tuesday’s hearing by the blue ribbon committee, Kim did not withhold any information to the Senate body.
He was spontaneous and forthright in his answers to questions from senators.
Kim thought he was dealing with honest people and the money came from legitimate sources.
A junket operator hosts big-time gamblers, taking care of their needs like hotel accommodations, restaurants to dine in and places to go to, even lending them money when they run out of cash.
That’s how P450 million, part of the loot, ended up in Kim’s hands.
In a phone conversation I had with Kim yesterday morning, he said he was returning the P450 million to the Bangladesh government.
He said the amount came from Shuhua Gao, a junket operator from Beijing, who borrowed the money from him after losing heavily in the casino.
Kim told the blue ribbon committee on Tuesday he would return the stolen money when he was asked by Sen. Sonny Angara if he would do so after finding out the money paid to him was stolen.
But it seems Kim will be returning much more than the P450 million he promised the Senate committee Tuesday.
Yesterday afternoon, I had a talk with his son Kevin who said the family would also return $4.6 million at Solaire casino under Kim’s name for safekeeping.
Another amount is P40 million deposited with the Wong family-owned Eastern Hawaii Leisure Corp. which would have been gambled away by Kim’s Chinese guests at the Midas casino, Kevin said.
All told, Kim’s family will return P701,784,000 to the Bangladesh government.
The figure was taken by adding P450 million, P211,784,000 ($4.6 million converted to pesos at the current exchange rate of P46.04 to the US dollar) and P40 million.
Kevin told me his father decided to return the money after a family council meeting.
In that meeting, Kevin and his sister Kathryn told their father, “Pa, maski maghirap tayo dapat natin isauli ang pera na alam na nating ninakaw (Papa, even if we become poor we should return the money that we now know was stolen).”
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I said in this space Tuesday Kim Wong was an honest man and I was proven right.
I’ve known Kim since 1978 when he was just 16 years old.
At that time, he was an errand boy of Impierno, a girlie bar I frequented in Ermita, Manila, while I was a police reporter for Manila Bulletin.
The bar owner, Sofio Tiu, told me Wong was an honest employee who never told a lie.
Many years later, when Kim and I became partners in a restaurant business, I found that he had had retained honesty as a virtue.
That’s why I am repeating what I wrote in Tuesday’s column and in previous columns: Kim couldn’t have taken part in the biggest electronic robbery in history.
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