PHL's slow legal process hampering recovery of stolen Bangladesh gov't money —Dhaka central bank lawyer

DHAKA, Bangladesh — The slow judicial process in the Philippines is hampering efforts to recover millions of dollars of money stolen from the Bangladesh government and laundered to a Manila bank, in one of the biggest cyber bank heists in the world in 2016, Dhaka’s central bank chief legal counsel said.

Ajmalul Hossain, lead counsel for Bangladesh Bank, said the case may take at least three decades to be resolved due to several stages of legal process in the Philippines, noting that the protracted procedure further diminishes the chances of recovering the stolen money.

“It’s going to be a long journey to recover the money through the Filipino legal system and the chances are it won’t happen,” Hossain told Filipino journalists in an interview Thursday night.

Hossain’s remarks indicates Bangladesh government’s frustration over what it calls “the slow wheels of justice” in the Philippines nearly three years since the theft happened.

Unidentified hackers believed to be from North Korea stole $81 million from the bank’s account at the New York Fed in February 2016.

The money was transferred to various accounts under fictitious names at the Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. (RCBC) in Manila and was laundered through Philippine casinos.

Bangladesh said RCBC and its officials are involved in a money laundering conspiracy – an accusation vehemently denied by the bank.

RCBC has blamed rogue employees and Philippine prosecutors have filed money laundering charges against a former RCBC bank manager and four people who owned the bank accounts where the funds were sent, but are not identifiable since the accounts were in fake names.

Although the Philippine government, through its concerned agencies like the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) and the Department of Justice, has been providing support to Bangladesh, Hossain lamented the “slow pace at which the wheels of justice turn.”

“The money belongs to the people of Bangladesh and the people of Bangladesh have been out of pocket as it were since February of 2016,” he said.

“So there’s the disappointment.”

Hossain said Bangladesh is looking into other options to recover its money, including a plan to seek legal remedy in the United States.

At the same time, he said Bangladesh remains open to negotiations with RCBC.

“We try to get it somewhere else in some other way without affecting what’s happening in the Philippines so Philippine legal process will continue in its own way,” he said.

After two years of investigation, the people or group responsible for the theft have yet to be identified and Bangladesh Bank has been able to retrieve only about $15 million from a junket operator in the Philippines.

The BSP slapped RCBC with a P1-billion fine for its failure to prevent the withdrawal of the stolen funds.

To ensure that such incident will not occur again, Hossain proposed for the establishment of a system in banks wherein anomalous transactions will be frozen immediately or reversed at once. —KBK, GMA News