Lawyer gets 20-year jail term for estafa

CEBU, Philippines - A lawyer was sentenced to suffer a maximum of 20 years imprisonment after he was found guilty of estafa.

The Regional Trial Court likewise ordered Atty. Luis Diores to pay the complainant the amount of P1.4 million plus the legal interest of his investment to the pyramiding scheme of the accused.

RTC Branch 6 Judge Ester Veloso found Diores guilty of the crime of estafa filed in 2003 by Serina Torralba.

Veloso sentenced Diores to suffer a minimum of four years and two months imprisonment and a maximum of twenty years.

The court has established that the accused, being in position of a lending company, practiced a scheme called the “Ponzi Scheme” that offered impossible interest rates to investors.

A string of estafa charges was filed against Diores, who was then the Executive Vice President and President of Pacific Lenders, Inc., after he failed to pay the promised interest and even return the amount invested by the investors.

Diores promised his investors a return of investment upon maturity with interest rate of four to five percent per month.

Torralba invested a total of P1,650,000 believing the promise was true. According to Torralba, she and her late husband, Arturo, met Diores in 1998 when they visited the Pacific Lenders after a relative told them to go to the company and invest their money.

Torralba said that they first invested P500, 000, in turn, they were made to sign an agreement that their money would earn five percent monthly interest for six months.

According to Torralba, she invested another P500,000 and P400,000, respectively, after the first investment was doing well. But she complained that the second and third investments were never returned to them.

The checks issued by Diores started bouncing because the account was already closed. Torralba presented before the court during the trial the checks that were not honored by the bank.

The court ruled that the testimony and the evidence presented by the prosecution proved that Diores “employed fraud and deceit upon gullible people to convince them to invest in the corporation,” despite him knowing that there will be no future profits or income and that “the corporation was bound to collapse as it did not seem to engage in any lucrative business to finance its operation.”. – AJ de la Torre/FPL (THE FREEMAN)