BIR urged to go after suspects in investment scam

MANILA, Philippines - Lawmakers on Thursday called on the Bureau of Internal Revenue to investigate and prosecute six officials of the Royal Manchester Five Trading Corp. who are allegedly involved in a new multi-billion peso investment scam. Cebu Rep. Eduardo Gullas said the government should do something about the racket that victimized even celebrities. He said the suspects should be liable “for possible wholesale income tax evasion." Catanduanes Rep. Joseph Santiago earlier called on the Anti-Money Laundering Council to conduct an investigation and if possible “freeze" the bank accounts of the six RMF officials, who all fled the country even before news of the scandal broke out. “To protect what is left of the money put in by the investing public, the AMLC should take purposeful pre-emptive action against the company and its officers and their bank accounts," Santiago said. In a statement, Gullas said “it is not enough that the authorities prosecute these gangs of swindlers for large-scale estafa." “The authorities should find ways to establish that they made a lot of potentially taxable income, but never reported, much less paid taxes." “If we look at the experience of the United States, prosecutors there have been quite successful in using tax-fraud charges to put away white-collar criminals," the Visayan lawmaker said. Gullas made the statement shortly after yet another entity, Royal Manchester Five Trading Corp., reportedly embezzled about P2.1-billion in funds entrusted by thousands of investors. Last year, thousands of investors in Performance Investment Products Corp. (PIPC) lost some P11.5 billion or $250 million after the firm's Singaporean owner, Michael Liew, suddenly disappeared. Liew left nearly empty all of the bank accounts of PIPC, which, like Royal Manchester, was also supposedly engaged in multi-currency trading. Prior to the RMF and PIPC scams, thousands of Filipino investors lost billions of pesos to the fraudulent pyramiding investment activities of Multinational Telecommunications Investors Corp. and The Tibayan Group of Companies, among other operators. - GMANews.TV