Bangladesh bank sent 3 urgent messages

“PLEASE be informed that this is a doubtful transaction. You are requested to stop the payment, and if you already made payment then freeze the account of the beneficiary for proper investigation. We think the transaction is contradictory with the anti-money laundering law.”

 

Thus read three messages sent by the Bangladeshi central bank to the Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. (RCBC) on the morning of Feb. 9, alerting the Yuchengco-controlled financial institution to the dubious provenance of the $81 million that was later revealed to be the largest money laundering caper in Philippine history, reports the Inquirer of Philippine.

 

The following day, Feb. 10, the Bangladesh Bank sent another message to RCBC through the Swift system which read: “Top urgent. Please be informed that this is a fraudulent transaction and unauthorized access in our Swift system. So you are requested to stop the payment and if you have already made the payment, then freeze the account of beneficiary and please [put] back the funds to the account number 21083190.”

 

Speaking at the Senate blue ribbon committee hearing Tuesday, RCBC legal chief Ma. Celia Fernandez-Estavillo said the Swift transmissions were sent via an “unauthenticated, free format” message “of normal priority” that did not immediately catch the attention of bank officials that Tuesday morning, amid the deluge of interbank fund transfer messages after the Chinese New Year long weekend.

 

790 messages

 

“So when we received 790 [Swift] messages, our officers proceeded to read the e-mails sequentially, unless we had a stop payment which would be the first that we would read or high priority messages, none of which applied to the Bangladesh Bank,” Estavillo said.

 

Sen. Teofisto “TG” Guingona, who chairs the committee, expressed dissatisfaction with RCBC’s procedures that allowed the funds to be withdrawn despite the subsequent messages from Bangladesh.

 

“Had you opened the text, you would have been sufficiently alarmed. It does say ‘top urgent, top urgent’,” the lawmaker said, reading the Swift message to RCBC.

 

Estavillo countered that Bangladeshi authorities used “vague terms” in its message, adding that the bank had, in the past, “received many stop orders but never anything as ambiguous as this.”

 

Guingona countered by quoting the message again: “We think the transaction is contradictory to the anti-money laundering law.”

 

“I think that’s clear enough,” he said. “I’m not a banker, but to me it’s pretty clear.”