Bankers find columnist’s explanation of Corona dollar accounts ‘plausible’

Bankers Thursday described as “plausible” the explanation posited by Inquirer columnist Rigoberto Tiglao who defended Chief Justice Renato Corona from allegations of having amassed some $12 million in as many as 82 bank accounts.

The bankers—speaking to the Inquirer on condition that they don’t be identified because of the political nature of the topic—uniformly said that an estimate of the Supreme Court chief’s bank account balances made by adding up all transaction values over time would be incorrect.

More importantly, the columnist’s explanation for Corona’s bank transactions may be a preview of the line of defense that the Chief Justice may put forward when he testifies before the Senate impeachment court on Tuesday, the bankers said.

“What they should have done is to ‘net out’ the deposits and the withdrawals, rather than add them all up,” said the banker, who heads a commercial bank.

“Netting out” is financial industry jargon for determining the difference between two values, usually the result of a purchase vis-a-vis a sale, or a deposit vis-a-vis a withdrawal.

Transactions not balances

Though he could not say so conclusively, the banker said it would be possible for each transaction to represent the same funds moving into and out of an account multiple times. One example, he said, is for the funds to be withdrawn by the account holder to be used to fund an investment in bonds, then returned to the account after it matures, having earned interest.

Another bank president who spoke to the Inquirer agreed that the contents of the Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) report presented by Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales recently represented “transactions” that “do not necessarily represent balances.”

“I don’t know how they came up with the balances, but if they just summed up the transactions, then it wouldn’t be accurate,” he added.

One ranking bank official also stressed that, in banking parlance, the term “account balance” is not synonymous with “transaction balance,” the latter having been used by the Ombudsman to describe the amounts allegedly belonging to Corona.

Where’s money from?

When viewed in this context, the banker said the contents of the bank accounts in question may turn out to be significantly lower than the $12 million initially suggested by the Ombudsman.

“Maybe the question should be where those funds came from, regardless of how much they were,” he said.

Thursday, the Inquirer spoke to an official of the AMLC, the agency that prepared the report on Corona’s transactions.

To recall, the law allows the AMLC, traditionally with the benefit of a court order, to look into suspicious bank “transactions”—meaning the movement of funds into and out of accounts—but not the account balances themselves.

This fine but key distinction may be one reason for the confusion as to exactly how much Corona has in his bank accounts.

The AMLC official, on condition of anonymity, described Tiglao’s column published Thursday as being “on the correct track.”