Owner of Legacy Bank to be arraigned today

MANILA, Philippines - Businessman-politician Celso delos Angeles Jr., owner of the controversial Legacy Group, is set to face arraignment today for a case of estafa filed by the state-run Philippine Deposit Insurance Corp. (PDIC) at the Regional Trial Court in Bacolod in July last year.

Delos Angeles has been charged with several cases of syndicated estafa and estafa cases relation to the failed operations of his 12 Legacy banks. The Legacy banks are a group of affiliated banks under the Legacy Group which were almost simultaneously placed by the Monetary Board under PDIC receivership in December 2008. There have been seven previous postponements of his arraignment in Bacolod since October 2010.

The Legacy owner was arrested in Quezon City in August 2010 and was detained in a hospital in Ormoc City in relation to a case filed against him by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) in Ormoc.

While he was in Ormoc, his arraignment for the PDIC case in Bacolod was postponed five times principally due to the failure of the jail warden to bring the accused to court for various reasons.

To facilitate the arraignment, records from RTC Bacolod were transmitted to RTC Ormoc last June but it was only in August that the case was raffled.

Meanwhile, Delos Angeles requested last June that he be transferred to a hospital in Tacloban City where he is detained to date.

The arraignment in Ormoc was postponed twice due to the failure of the provincial warden to produce the accused who, by then, was in Tacloban.

While the PDIC prayed to hold the warden in contempt, the court instead decided reset the arraignment to Sept. 19.

PDIC general counsel Romeo Mendoza Jr. expressed hope that the warden will comply with the court order in order for the arraignment to take place after seven postponements.

PDIC’s estafa case stemmed from the alleged conspiracy to misappropriate Nation Bank’s funds using a farmland in Negros Occidental. Nation Bank was one of the 12 Legacy banks located in Bacolod City.

PDIC has filed over 20 cases of syndicated estafa and large scale estafa has been filed against Delos Angeles and Legacy officers and employees before the Department of Justice (DOJ) as well as various courts all over the country.

PDIC said more cases are being prepared against Legacy officials as the forensic audit of P&A comes to a conclusion. The Legacy scam is considered to be among the biggest financial fraud schemes in Philippine history, involving 48 banking units across the archipelago and P14 billion in estimated insured deposits.

PDIC earlier announced that it has settled more than half of the almost P14 billion claims from depositors of the 13 affiliated banks of the Legacy Group. The total claims covering 121,354 accounts are worth P13.83 billion.