NextGen Day

The conviction of a former bank executive for money laundering in connection with the 2016 Bangladesh Bank theft has been upheld by the Court of Appeals.

The Makati Regional Trial Court Branch 149 decision finding Maia Santos-Deguito guilty of eight counts of violating Republic Act 9160 (Anti Money Laundering Act) and sentencing her to up to 58 years in prison was upheld by the CA’s First Division in a 58-page decision dated Feb. 6 that was recently made available online.

“Enhanced due diligence is the investigation of all complex, exceptionally big transactions, all strange patterns of transactions that have no discernible economic or legal purpose, and all other transactions that may be seen as suspicious. The court dismissed Deguito’s appeal, stating that aside from her unsupported claims, “nothing in the record establishes that Deguito exercised even the slightest form of diligence.”

The tribunal said, “Deguito cannot say that she is unaware of the obvious abnormalities in the inbound remittances credited to the Jupiter accounts or that she is powerless to correct them.

The sum was part of the online theft from the Bangladesh Bank that occurred on February 4, 2016, when online thieves transferred money using unauthorized SWIFT (Society of Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications) payment instructions (PI) to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where the Bangladesh Bank kept its foreign exchange funds.

Only five of these PIs—out of 35—were cleared by SWIFT, involving a total of USD101 million. Of this amount, $20 million was recovered in Sri Lanka, while the rest $81 million ended up in the Philippines.

Due to an error in the recipient beneficiary’s name in Sri Lanka, the payment for one of the PIs was blocked.

The four PIs that did move forward were transferred to four hurriedly made Philippine bank accounts at RCBC’s Jupiter Bank, where Deguito was a manager at the time.

Deguito acknowledged that the rules had been broken when the accounts were opened, which she claimed had been approved by Kim Wong, a bank customer whom she knew personally.

“Deguito’s hasty use of the monies in question suggests that she intends to shift them quickly. The owner of the Jupiter accounts was not present at RCBC Jupiter when the withdrawals were made, which is even more outrageous, the tribunal concluded in refusing Deguito’s appeal. (

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