Senate urged to probe ‘unregulated investment platforms’ in PH

MANILA, Philippines — The Anti-Trapo Movement has called on the Senate to investigate the alleged involvement of unregulated investment platforms in money laundering in the Philippines.

In a letter sent to the offices of Senators Risa Hontiveros and Sherwin Gatchalian, Anti-Trapo Movement Founding President Leon Estralla Peralta said certain multinational companies’ dominant market power “enables them to ignore local regulators’ directives, contributing to Money Laundering in the Philippines.”

“Despite clear instructions from our country’s leadership to combat money laundering, Apple and Google, two of the largest multinational companies operating in the Philippines, continue to disregard the requests of regulatory authorities – the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) — to ban unregulated investment platforms from their app stores,” said Peralta.

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According to him, it has been months since the implementation of the ban took place, and yet unregulated and unregistered platforms remain accessible on Google and Apple’s application stores.

“Alarmingly, these apps continue to advertise to Filipinos, offering absolutely no protection to our investing public. This blatant disobedience and disregard for our regulators is deeply concerning,” said Peralta.

“Both the SEC and NTC have issued warnings and absolute bans against several unregulated platforms. The SEC issued warnings against cryptocurrency and investment platforms – Etoro and Gemini. It also publicly banned the investment platforms Binance, MiTrade, and OctaFX. However, these continue to be available on Apple and Google app stores,” he added.

To support his claims, Peralta cited suspended Bamban Mayor Alice Guo’s case, actively being probed by Hontiveros and Gatchalian, pointing out that if the Anti Money Laundering Council supposedly failed to monitor locally registered companies, how much more for unregistered foreign entities?

“We urge you to look into how these money launderers use these platforms to launder money (e.g. through cryptocurrencies passing through unregulated investment platforms or exchanges),” he said.

“[Google and Apple’s] ability to ignore government directives must be scrutinized. We urge our legislators to reform laws to empower our regulators and ensure they are not at the mercy of these large multinational tech companies,” he added.

INQUIRER.net has sought Hontiveros’ and Gatchalian’s comments on the matter, but they have yet to respond as of this writing.

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