The Anti-Money Laundering Council has asked the Department of Justice to prosecute the controversial remittance firm PhilRem Service Corp. for its involvement in the money laundering of the illegally transferred $81-million Bangladeshi funds to a local bank.
In a 17-page joint complaint-affidavit filed on Thursday, the AMLC charged PhilRem president Salud Bautista, chairman of the board and treasurer Michael “Concon” Bautista, and Anthony Pelejo, compliance officer of PhilRem, with money laundering.
The council revealed that the stolen funds were credited to fictitious bank accounts of Michael Cruz, Jessie Christopher Lagrosas, Alfred Vergara, and Enrico Vasquez, which were all opened on May 15, 2015.
It said fictitious dollar and peso accounts of William So Go opened on Feb. 5, 2016 and July 30, 2014, respectively, were likewise involved. All bank accounts were maintained at the RCBC Jupiter Business Center Branch in Makati. Go had already denied owning the peso and dollar accounts involved.
Of the stolen Bangladeshi funds, $65,668,664.37 was withdrawn from the fictitious bank accounts of Cruz, Lagrosas, Vergara, and Vasquez on Feb. 5 and 9, 2016, then transferred to the “Go/Centurytex” account. At least $13 million of that amount was then transferred to the RCBC account of Abba Currency Exchange Inc., on Febr. 9, 2016.
On Feb. 5, 9, and 10, 2016, the balance of $52,668,664.37 in the Go account was transferred to the RCBC-Unimart Greenhills account of PhilRem.
On Feb. 9, 2016, $15,215,922.26 from Vasquez’s account was also transferred to PhilRem’s account at RCBC-Unimart Greenhills.
On Feb. 11, 2016, Abba and Beacon transferred $10 million and $3 million to the RCBC-Pasig branch account of PhilRem.
In total, $61 million was eventually converted and transferred to PhilRem’s peso account at the RCBC-Unimart Greenhills branch.
On Feb. 17, 2016, Pelejo submitted a suspicious transaction report (STR) indicating that $80,884,641.63 had been remitted to Eastern Hawaii and Weikang Xu as instructed by a certain “William Go.”
The AMLC found out that the fact that Kim Wong received funds from PhilRem was omitted from the STR narrative submitted by Pelejo.
The agency stressed that PhilRem had the responsibility to conduct “Know Your Customer Rule” and keep identification record when it dealt with “Go,” the owner of the account to whom a large part of the stolen funds were transferred.
“What is highly irregular was that respondent spouses claimed that they were dealing with [RCBC Jupiter] Branch Manager [Maia] Deguito, and not the ‘owner’ of the account, ‘William So Go,’” read the complaint-affidavit.
“It is contrary to business practice that a person would deal in large amounts of money with someone who is not the owner of the account, nor someone who was duly authorized by the owner,” the complaint noted.
The AMLC said the PhilRem officials were clearly aware that the funds were not legitimate when they deliberately ignored the AMLA requirements to conduct the KYC rule and record keeping of customer information.
“Had they done so, respondent spouses would have personally interviewed the real William Go and discover that the latter was not aware of the existence of the RCBC Account Nos. 9016455240 and 9010270206,” read the complaint.
The AMLC said PhilRem actually commingled the stolen funds and acted as “cleaning house,” making it extremely difficult to trace the source and flow of the funds by “washing” the funds and concealing the money trail.
AMLC said the services of PhilRem was actually unnecessary because the funds could have been directly transferred from the bank account of “Go” to the bank accounts of the beneficiaries, but that would have been easily prevented or tracked within the banking sector.
The AMLC also noted how the respondents continued to possess more or less $17 million of the stolen funds remitted through their company and failed to account for its alleged delivery to Weikang Xu.
The agency also stressed that the unauthorized access to Bangladesh Bank’s system amounted to “hacking” or “cracking,” punishable under Section 33 (a) of the Electronic Commerce Act.