Federal Reserve account was wired to a Manila branch of Rizal Commercial Banking Corp (RCBC).
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Shares of Bank of America rose 10 cents to $13.50 at 8 a.m.in early NY trading. It has enacted legislation against money laundering and set up a dedicated regulatory body to handle violations.
Sergio Osmena III, chairman of the Philippine Senate’s committee on Banks, Financial Institutions and Currencies, said Thursday he is preparing to propose amendments to the anti-money laundering law. A successor, Kristie Kenney, said in a 2008 cable that the bank secrecy laws and poor whistle-blower protections hindered corruption and graft investigations.
DHAKA Bangladesh police met an official of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in Dhaka on Sunday to try to track down culprits in an attempted $951 million cyber heist from the country’s central bank.
Tetangco said he believed it was the first case of cross-border money laundering in the Philippines and vowed to address loopholes in local laws to prevent such cases recurring.
Paul Bromberg, chief executive of Spectrum Asia, an investigative and gambling industry consultancy noted, “a good reason for targeting the Philippines could be the unusual situation where casinos have not been required to comply with the same anti-money-laundering regime that governs the banking system”.
Officials who run the global money transfer system known as Swift said its systems had not been breached and said the matter was an internal issue at Bangladesh’s central bank.
The investigators are looking into the laundering through the Philippine financial system of $81 million stolen by Chinese computer hackers from the account of Bangladesh Bank, the Bangladeshi central bank, in the Federal Reserve Bank of NY last month. It brought a darker shade of reality: that money makes the world go round.
Quezon, however, conceded that the country’s bank secrecy law should be amended to address money laundering, considering that even Switzerland, a country that valued the privacy of its bank account holders for the longest time, is also mulling easing its bank secrecy laws by 2017.
That, he said, is the reason why the AMLC has been working with Congress to expand the coverage of the Anti-Money Laundering Act to include casinos and real estate.
Her lawyer, Ferdinand Topacio, told DZMM radio Thursday that his client has emails and text messages proving senior RCBC officers approved transferring the funds to the casino operators. The rest was transferred to two casinos in the Philippines. But the bank manager ignored the order from headquarters and quickly moved much of the money out of the bank, Fernandez-Estavillo said. “If there is no credible resolution, then of course that will be a problem but judging from how things are moving, I think there will be some decisive action taken”.
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“We will return P10,474,654 to the Bangladeshis not just as a sign of apology, but as symbol of a Filipino company willing to find justice”, she said.
