We join other Filipinos in profoundly watching the threads surrounding the Kapa Community Ministry International Inc., which have fathomably gone across economic, religious and legal borders.
Recently, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a criminal complaint against the Bislig, Surigao del Sur-founded group—it has since transferred its headquarters to Alabel, Sarangani in the Soccsksargen Region—its founder and president Joel Apolinario, trustee Margie Danao and corporate secretary Reyna Apolinario.
Their crime, according to the complaint filed with the Department of Justice by SEC chair Emilio Aquino, was that Kapa “amassed wealth through an investment scam in the guise of religion and at the expense of the investing public.”
The SEC has implicated and identified other people in, according to the body, promoting the investment scam, which violated Republic Act 8799, or the Securities Regulation Code, and promised to name more respondents in the loop in what has been described as the “unlawful public offering and/or selling of securities by Kapa.”
Apace with these allegations, the SEC said Kapa used a Ponzi scheme—an illegal pyramid selling plan which uses money from people who have just invested to pay people who have already invested, instead of using real profit to pay them—which is a duplicitous, if Janus-faced, transaction prohibited under SRC’s Section 26.
Then SEC, in a legal argument, said those found to have breached the existing ad rem rules and regulations faced individually a maximum fine of P5 million or jail of seven to 21 years, or both at the judgment of the courts.
Added on argument, still from the SEC, is the penalty to be meted out to Kapa officers should be one degree higher than what was prescribed under the rules since it said they used social media sites in their scheme.
We watch from a discerning distance as the threads develop, the cord around the crenelated Kapa group getting curiouser and curiouser.