NY court summons Manila bank officials over racketeering case
Philippine Veterans Bank chairman Roberto de Ocampo and a number of current and retired Bangko Sentral and Veterans Bank officials have been summoned by a New York court to answer a racketeering complaint.
The wire and mail fraud complaint under the dreaded Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act was filed by US lawyer William J. “Skipp” Scott, who claimed he lost a “seven-figure cash infusion” in the collapsed BankWise thrift bank even after it had been taken over by Veterans Bank.
Scott, whose Philippine investments include ownership stakes in Wine Depot, a call center and a law partnership with Ateneo Law associate dean Lily Gruba, had earlier represented the province of Marinduque in a damage suit dismissed in Nevada for wrong venue against the new Canadian owners of the ill-fated Marcopper mine.
Scott also listed himself as having once worked as “special US legal counsel to the Office of the President for the Republic of the Philippines and as special adviser to the secretary of finance for the Republic of the Philippines.”
Scott claimed he stepped into BankWise as a white knight in 2003 in return for a “risk-adjusted rate of return of 20 percent or more,” after having been inveigled by bank director Vicente Campa Jr and, subsequently, by other BankWise and Veterans Bank officials during several meetings at the Bangko Sentral.
“Having the Philippines’ central bank directly involved legitimized the transaction, upon which plaintiff reasonably relied,” Scott told the New York Southern District Court.
But after the Veterans Bank took over BankWise in 2004, Scott claimed he was treated as a depositor, rather than as a funder, of the ill-fated bank.
After Veterans Bank subsumed BankWise in 2004, the Bangko Sentral, Philippine Deposit Insurance Corp. and ironically Veterans Bank itself refused to infuse any cash into the faltering bank, resulting in deepening its illiquidity to over P2.6 billion by 2007 from about P185 million in 2004, the complaint alleged.
Veterans Bank itself received a P2.3 billion emergency loan from the Bangko Sentral in 2008 in order to pay off BankWise’s uninsured depositors, but not including Scott.
According to New York court records, electronic summons have already been issued to former deputy Bangko Sentral governor Alberto Reyes, who was in charge of banking supervision at that time, as well as to the present Bangko Sentral and Monetary Bank leadership.
A pre-trial conference has been set for Sept. 29.