Ex-bank manager meted 1,228 years

In what could be a record of sorts for a jail term, the court sentenced a former bank manager to 1,228 years imprisonment after he was found guilty of pocketing P10.8 million from a client through forgery.

Regional Trial Court judge Geraldine Faith Econg also ordered Antonio Soontit, who used to be the manager of Solidbank-Taboan branch, to reimburse the bank of P12.8 million, representing the actual amount that he pocketed and the litigation expenses.

Soontit was found guilty of 45 counts of estafa through falsification of public documents. He was acquitted in one case due to lack of sufficient evidence. The crimes were committed from 1993 to 1995.

The longest jail sentence ever was passed in the United States. Dudley Wayne Kyzer was sentenced to 10,000 years in jail by a court in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1981 for a triple murder. The victims were his wife, mother-in-law, and a college student.

In Spain, a postman was sentenced to 7,019 years in jail for on March 11, 1972 for failing to deliver 42,768 letters. The prosecutors, according to www.trivialibraray.com., demanded a sentence of 384,912 years.

Although Soontit's sentence is 12 plus over a quarter centuries long, under the law he could not be detained for more than 40 years, Econg said.

Soontit's punishment for each of the cases that he was convicted of varied from 19 to 30 years. The bank's accountant, Amelita Madamba, testified before the court that Soontit, during lunchtime, would instruct her and the other junior bank officials to prepare a manager's or cashier's check and the accompanying documents.

Madamba said, Soontit would then bring the documents out of the bank for the bank client - Juanito Go - to sign it and would come back later already with the signed application form for a manager's or cashier check.

The prosecution witnesses admitted that there was a deviation in the regular bank procedure in procuring a manager's check, but they just allowed it because it was their manager who ordered them to do such.

The court observed that the debit memo for the purchase of the check was handed over to the bank officials, not by the depositor himself or his duly authorized representative, but by the accused himself.

Second, the bank employees, particularly the officers did not see the client sign the debit memo and it is only the accused who gave them the document already bearing the signature these were taken out of the bank during lunchtime.

"A cursory study of the evidence on record reveals unmistakably that denial by the accused of the acts charged in all the information by the accused is not supported by any other evidence to render the same of probative value," Econg ruled.

According to Econg, while Soontit questioned the handwriting expert's qualification as an expert witness, he does not put forward any evidence to counter the prosecution's clear and convincing claim that the signature appearing in the debit demos in all instances except for one case was forged.

"Accused may claim that prosecution was not able to present direct evidence to prove that he himself falsified the signatures of Mr. Go in each of the checks so that the reflected in the checks can be drawn, the circumstantial evidence, however, convincingly proves that accused is the person who committed all the acts alleged in the information," said Econg in her 128-page decision.

"These circumstances, having been proved with certainty by clear and convincing evidence, are, together with the inherent weakness of the defense of such nature that an analysis and combination of all of them would lead to the conclusion that accused is guilty," the court ruling said.

Soontit tried to pass on the liability to his junior officials saying that they were the ones who first verified the documents for the checks including the signatures to show that everything is in order before they were submitted to him for approval.

But the junior bank officials explained that only Soontit was in the best position to authenticate the signature of Juanito Go as the same was made in his presence after the documents were reportedly brought by him out of the bank for the client's signature.