Don’t drag us into your mess, RCBC told

THE PRESIDENT of East West Bank is irked at his bank’s name being dragged into the $81-million money laundering case involving the Yuchengco-run Rizal Commercial Banking Corp.

Reaffirming a statement issued during a Senate hearing last week, EastWest president Antonio Moncupa Jr. said his bank did not have any transaction linked to any violation of the Anti-Money Laundering Act (AMLA) in connection with the case being probed by the Senate blue ribbon committee.

“Let the truth be out and justice be served in this money laundering issue re: (regarding) RCBC,” Moncupa tweeted.

Moncupa said he was not sure why RCBC kept on attaching the name of EastWest every time some people mentioned RCBC employees who were hired from EastWest and who were allegedly involved in this money laundering issue.

Maia Santos-Deguito, the branch manager who had facilitated the opening of bank accounts that received the suspicious inflow of $81 million and is accused of processing the withdrawal of these funds, used to work for EastWest and is friends with Allan Peñalosa, the store manager of EastWest’s BGC Burgos circle branch.

“For us in EastWest, it’s important that this be put in its proper context so that the public may better appreciate it,” Moncupa said.

“I would like to state that the mentioned employees have been in RCBC much longer than they were in EastWest,” he said.

Moncupa said the two RCBC employees who were former EastWest employees mentioned in the ongoing probe did not even work with Deguito in her branch when she was with EastWest. One was even hired after Deguito had already left the bank to join RCBC.

“I’d like to believe this is not a PR project and there is no malice. But it is important to set the context. And to clarify, EastWest has no AMLA-mable transaction in connection with this money laundering issue. It is clear that it is another bank and not EastWest that appears to be  involved,” he said.

The $81 million in inward remittance to RCBC and later credited to four accounts at RCBC’s Jupiter branch on Feb. 5 turned out to be money stolen by hackers from the bank account of the central bank of Bangladesh at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

“It is unfortunate that we have one of our officers embroiled in this case in his personal capacity. When you have 6,118 people, it cannot be helped that from time to time, a few of them will get dragged into civil and even criminal disputes on their personal activities outside of EastWest Bank,” he said.

Businessman William Go earlier accused Peñalosa of enticing him with a “P200 million” money-making deal with Deguito. In the second Senate hearing last Thursday, Peñalosa admitted arranging the meeting between Go and Deguito but denied making any such offer.

Go is one of the individuals tagged in this case because of a US dollar account under his name that consolidated the bulk of proceeds from the $81 million in inward remittance. He denied owning the account and accused Deguito and her deputy of falsifying documents.

Peñalosa, however, admitted to helping Go with a rediscounting scheme for the latter’s company Centurytex. Based on his testimony, he said he received post-dated checks payable to Go and gave them to Deguito but said he did not know how and where it was deposited.