Group of aggrieved plan holders revives estafa class suit vs Lifetime Plans

BY ABOUT 450 plan holders on Monday went to the Department of Justice (DoJ) to file a total of more than 1,600 counts of syndicated estafa against executives of Abundance Providers and Entrepreneurs Corp. (APEC) — then Pacific Plans, Inc. (PPI) — led by businessman Alfonso Yuchengco.

840 counts of “syndicated estafa by means of deceit” and 840 counts of “syndicated estafa by abuse of confidence were filed against Mr. Yuchencgo, Alfonso Yuchengco III, Ambrosio Padilla, George Dee, Helen Dee, Paul Sycip, and 30 others by disenfranchised plan holders.

Lawyer Joshua Santiago who stands counsel for the group said: “We are focusing all our efforts to delivering this case to court and getting the justice the disenfranchised plan holders deserve.”

In a statement, the complainants, who declined to be named, recounted their grievances against the pre- need company. The group recalled: “In June 2004, PPI unilaterally transferred the assets and liabilities of its pension, memorial, and fixed- value educational plans to a new company, Lifetime Plans.” Two months later, GPL holdings bought Lifetime Plans’ stake in PPI. In 2009, Noel Oñante of Zest Air acquired PPI.

The group said that “they were only informed of the takeover through letters sent via mail,” adding that no explanation was given to them.

“Sometime in [ 2004], the Department of Finance ( DoF), which has supervision over corporate regulators, called for a probe on the series of inter- company transactions, that eventually led to the sale of PPI. The company then had almost P17 billion in assets, nearly P3 billion in receivables from installment contracts, and 400,000 plan holders. Yet at the time of the sale, it claimed it had no resources to fund the claims,” the group stated.

The group also contested that in 2009, the company had “P591 million available as tuition assistance payments. Of the amount P250 million came from Yuchengco Group of Companies head Alfonso Yuchengco, and P341 million from Pacific Plans itself. None of the money was distributed to the plan holders.”

An earlier class suit against Mr. Yuchengcho and several others who served as part of the executive board of Pacific Plans. was dismissed by the DoJ on 2013, saying that the complainant “failed to prove that respondents committed any unlawful act or carry out transactions of soliciting funds from the public by way of investments in fraudulent scheme.” —