$81M withdrawn when stop payment order came, says Deguito

Maia Santos-Deguito INQUIRER PHOTO/LYN RILLON

MAIA Santos-Deguito, the sacked branch manager of Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. (RCBC), said Tuesday that the stolen $81 million had been withdrawn when she received a stop payment order from the bank’s headquarters.

Testifying at the Senate’s fifth hearing on antimoney laundering, Deguito said she was told by RCBC treasurer Raul Tan that it was not the bank’s problem that most of the funds stolen from the Bangladesh account in a New York bank had been withdrawn when the request to hold them came.

She said that prior to the withdrawals, RCBC regional sales director Brigitte Capina effectively said there was no reason to hold the funds after these were flagged by the bank days earlier.

As manager of the RCBC branch on Jupiter street in Makati City, Deguito has been implicated in the laundering scheme. Her branch had processed the withdrawals of the loot. She has since been removed from her post.

‘Misrepresentations’

RCBC lawyer Maria Celia Estavillo said Deguito’s “misrepresentations” on the accounts had prompted the bank to lift its temporary hold on these. The branch manager also supposedly facilitated the withdrawals from the account.

According to Deguito, she got an e-mail from RCBC’s settlements department on Feb. 9 for the recall of funds from the accounts that got the $81 million. This was the same day the central bank of Bangladesh first sent the request to RCBC to freeze the accounts. RCBC got the funds on Feb. 5.

But Deguito said there had already been withdrawals from the accounts when she got the message. Since there was nothing she could do and the withdrawals had been made, she called up Capina.

She said she told Capina she had a problem, as there was a recall of funds e-mail, and she could no longer get back the funds from the beneficiaries. But she said she knew where the funds were—some were in the account of businessman William Go, a longtime client, and some were with the remittance firm Philrem. (Go has denied knowledge of the deposit.)

“I was hoping they could do something about it,” she said.

‘Not our problem’

Capina told her that she would let her talk to Tan, and handed over the phone to him to the RCBC treasurer.

“I told him, ‘sir, I have a problem, because I could no longer recall anything from the four accounts that had been credited. But the funds are there.’ Then he told me that’s not our problem, that’s Bangladesh’s problem,” the former bank manager said.

Tan, for his part, said: “I do not recall saying that was Bangladesh bank’s problem. I explained what was a request for recall… the notice, I explained to her what it was.”

Deguito asked him about the recall process, he said. He also called up an official of the bank’s operations group to e-mail him a copy of the request to recall order. He also said that by that time, he assumed that the money had been withdrawn.

Text messages, e-mails

Deguito said she had a series of text messages with bank officials where she informed them of the situation.

“I informed all of them. They knew there was a problem on Feb. 9. But still they continued to trade the dollars,” she said.

She denied as well that she hastened the withdrawals from the accounts. It was just that at the time of the withdrawal request, the documents were in order and she had no authority to hold the transactions, she added.

Deguito said that when the $81 million was first credited to the RCBC accounts on the afternoon of Feb. 5, she did not get any call from the settlements department seeking documents to support the remittances, as had been the usual practice when she worked in other banks.

She asked one of her staff members to e-mail the settlements department to ask for a copy of the MT103 [message text 103], which would contain details of where the funds came from and who was the beneficiary. The department replied to the e-mail in the evening of the same day.

Instructions from Wong

In the meantime, she followed instructions from casino junket operator Kim Wong on the phone on what to do with the money, which was to convert some of the dollars to pesos and remit these to Eastern Hawaii Leisure Co. and Bloomberry Hotels Inc.

In the evening of the same day, she received a call from her boss Nestor Pineda asking her when the accounts were opened (May 2015), and if she had been waiting for these remittances. She said her reply was that she was not waiting for these remittances, but for a big volume to enter the branch.

Pineda also asked her if the funds in the accounts could be put on hold. She replied that if this would be done, he should e-mail her.

Deguito said she then called up Capina and told her that Pineda wanted to hold the amounts but Capina indicated that there was no need to do this.

“She (Capina) said, ‘why would those be held, when those are remittances, those are cleared funds?’ Those passed through corresponding banks, there was due diligence, so there was no need to hold them,” she said.