Legacy Victims here: Who’s Who
The sight of former city mayor Jose Torralba was enough gauge that the victims of the large scale swindle involving the Legacy Group and its bank affiliate Pilipino Rural Bank, Tagbilaran Branch, read like’s a who’s who in Bohol’s religious, political, and business firmament.
In a radio interview, the former city executive admitted that he was one of the depositors of the closed bank. The money, he said, was the proceeds of his retirement benefits as a former public official.
The social register of prominent victims was known to the public during a face-to-face meeting Thursday at the Bohol Cultural Center with top officials of the Philippine Deposit Insurance Corp. in attendance. The PDIC is tasked by the government to process claims of the failed rural bank depositors in the vicinity of 4,000 in Bohol alone. Deposits are insured up to P250,000 per account and any excess will be shouldered by the management of the collapsed banking entity.
In the case of the Pilipino Rural Bank, local branch, there was no mention of a management assurance that any excess of the insurable interest will be absorbed by the bank owners.
The prominent victims during the Thursday meeting were standouts in the crowd.
Numbering around a quarter of the entire line up of victims, those who attended the meeting as arranged by Gov. Erico Aumentado made up mostly of lowly investors who thought firsthand that they have struck a gold mine in Legacy.
They realized albeit lately that the gold mine they were hoping for was nothing but a ticking time bomb. In no time, it exploded right smack in the faces of the innocent victims.
How the Legacy scheme works?
Here’s how: A solicitor representing the Legacy group induced unsuspecting investors to deposit their money in the Pilipino Rural Bank. The pre-need company has nine other rural banks scattered all over the country and the arrangement was repeated all over again with the investor issued a Certificate of Time Deposit right then there. With the transaction consummated, the Legacy manager will then issue the pre-signed PDCs representing one year in advance interest. With the advance interest in checks, the holder will wait for the time that it will be good for encashment. During the early years of its Bohol operations, the rob-Pablo-pay -Juan caper was still as good while it lasted. The rising pyramid started to show signs of crumbling when no new batch of investors came in, to pay old ones resulting in the collapse of the financial stockpile boosted by a brittle life support system.
PROMINENT VICTIMS
Seen during Thursday’s meeting aside from the ex-city mayor, were businessman Al Uy of People’s Lumber, Engr. Abdon Anora, Drs. Arcay and Nacua and a host of others belonging to the middle and lower income groups.
There were reports that a church organization was one of the victims but it has to be confirmed yet. However, the estate of a bishop long dead was suspected to be part of the long list of victims involving religious denominations.
A coterie of foreigners was also seen during the meeting indicating that although they earn in dollars, pounds, deutche marks as the case may be, they still wanted their money to earn more only to end up holding the empty bag.
There was no exact amount being quoted by the victims themselves for fear that they be subjected to external examination by the Bureau of Internal Revenue more so if the money was not declared in their statement of income and liabilities.
Another reason was that the victims were ashamed to go public knowing that they were duped out of greed. To them, it appeared that the urge to amass more money for their dormant savings, in the guise of high-yielding financial instruments, seemed irresistible. A syndicated estafa by any measure, the money scam goes down in Bohol’s swindling history as the biggest ever known to man. In Bohol alone, the staggering amount swindled from helpless investors could be in the millions of pesos.
RETIREES HIT HARD
But one uncontestable fact as the list of victims has grown bigger and bigger with each passing day was the reality that the bulk of the swindled kind was government retirees who were hoping that one day their monthly pension fund would multiply by leaps and bounds under the generous double-your-money offering.
Government retirees were in the firing line of gullible victims after it was learned that no less than a top official of the local Government Service Insurance System (GSIS) was acting as investment agent of the shuttered bank.
During her heydays in the GSIS, she was said to have seduced retirees into investing the double-your-money caper through the PRBank.
THE SCAM
In the case of Legacy, although it was more identified with selling pre-need plans like education, memorial and pension, its agents were more engaged in the selling of investment securities under cover of double-your-money returns in as low as two and a half years.
In the early days of the scheme, the terminal maturity of the generous offer of high interest was five years, then it was shortened to three years and finally two and a half years.
In the dying days of the Legacy operations in Bohol, meaning last October, solicitors even lured potential investors of say P50,000 plus the high interest and one sack of Ganador rice brand.
It was only last October that Legacy watchers smelled something wrong in the company’s vain efforts to keep its operations going.
Although it was already teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, the company gave a semblance of legitimacy of its troubled operations by changing advanced interest covered by post-dated checks. The PDCs were covered by current accounts of the company opened in at least two commercial banks based in this city. The checking accounts had since been closed and that explained why the PDCs were changed with personal checks owned by a company official.
SOURCE: Sen Guingging, BOHOL TIMES
This entry was posted by jnet on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 at 11:46 pm and is filed under Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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