Manila unit of ING disputes businessman’s claims

The Manila unit of ING Bank disputed the claims made by one of the group’s clients that he was persuaded by bank officials to invest in securities that were not meant to be sold locally.

In documents filed in Congress, ING Bank country manager Consuelo Garcia claimed the complainant, Washington Lou, was never a client of ING in Manila. Lou, Garcia said, was a client of the Dutch banking giant’s Singapore subsidiary.

Lou, a businessman based in Bacolod, said he lost more than $5 million of his family’s money—including his parents’ retirement funds—in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis in investments sold to him by ING.

He has since sued the bank’s Manila unit in several fora, including the Bacolod Regional Trial Court, alleging that the “sophisticated” investments were aggressively sold to him by the bank’s officials despite his inexperience in such instruments.

In a statement before a House committee investigating the complaint, Garcia said that Lou was a sophisticated investor as evidenced by his trading history.

“What should be starkly obvious by now, and has been already duly noted by several members of this Honorable Committee, is that Lou’s complaint is nothing more than an effort … to evade the consequences of their investment decisions and pass the blame to everyone else but themselves,” Garcia said in the statement which was obtained by the INQUIRER.

It was also pointed out in the statement that the losses suffered by Lou were due, to a large degree, to the sharp drop in the prices of securities as the global financial crisis unfolded four years ago.

“Lou has admitted that, prior to the crisis of 2008, he had no objections or complaints because he was, to be frank, ‘making money,’” she said. “With the unprecedented global crisis in 2008, the situation changed.”

“ING Bank Manila submits that in that situation, no banking institution and no officer of a bank should be blamed for losses incurred by investors all over the world due to a global financial crisis,” she added.

To date, Lou has filed complaints against ING before the courts and regulators such as the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In the same statement, Garcia said these were the wrong venues for Lou to air his complaints. She said he should have addressed his grievances with the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the regulator in charge of ING’s operations where the businessman’s investments were booked.