BSP wants 2 SC justices off bank case

Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. INQUIRER.net FILE PHOTO

BANKING regulators are asking two associate justices of the Supreme Court to recuse themselves from hearing and deciding on the 17- year dispute between the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas and the owners of the defunct Orient Development Bank Corp., which collapsed in 1998 amid allegations of financial irregularities.

In a petition filed earlier this month, BSP said that Justice Presbitero Velasco Jr. had, in the past, executed two promissory notes—documents signifying indebtedness—to Orient Bank for P20 million.

In its latest petition, however, BSP added that it was provided with another set of two promissory notes and other documents linking Velasco “to the grant of millions of money from Orient Bank at the time when Orient Bank was already hemorrhaging, and emergency financial assistance was being released by the Bangko Sentral.”

BSP also asked that Justice Bienvenido Reyes inhibit himself from hearing the Orient Bank case as he was previously an associate justice of the Court of Appeals and had “acted in a manner not in accord with his sworn constitutional duty to uphold the rule of law.”

In particular, BSP pointed out that Reyes, while still a member of the appellate court in 2001, wrote a pro-Orient Bank decision upholding a lower court’s ruling that ordered the reopening of Orient Bank and stopping BSP from collecting millions it had lent the shuttered firm “motu proprio and without notice given to respondent Bangko Sentral’s Monetary Board.”

A separate briefing document prepared by BSP on the issue described the ex-parte decision of Reyes as “being the first in the history of the Court of Appeals where a case was decided without affording a party litigant the right to be notified and heard.” This decision was recalled by the Court of Appeals nine days later, but not before BSP ran to the Supreme Court for relief.

The latest petition marked the third time BSP has asked that judges recuse themselves from the Orient Bank case for alleged conflicts of interest.

“In filing these motions since 2013 before the Honorable Court, BSP, whose interest has to be protected in this case, humbly has prayed and reiterated that in the deliberation of the case, the independence, probity and impartiality of the justices to decide this case should be beyond question,” the central bank’s petition read. “For it is the obligation and duty of the BSP to protect the interest of the government’s billions of money involved in this proceeding.”