Enter here, and vanish
FROM the air, rich Chinese flying into the Philippines to gamble or Filipinos flying out to work overseas for a living can see the distinctive Solaire Resort and Casino beside the murky waters of Manila Bay. It was into these auspicious premises in early February that a money-remittance company, Philrem, moved about $60m stolen from Bangladesh’s central bank, delivering over half of it in cash. The money was part of $101m taken, of which $81m ended up in the Philippines. In all, only $20m has so far been recovered.
Once behind the walls of the Solaire Resort, the swag disappeared, converted into untraceable gambling chips (other money went to an online gaming firm). “Our money trail ended up at the casinos,” the executive director of the Philippines’ Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC), Julia Bacay-Abad, has told a Senate committee holding public hearings into the case.

The AMLC picked up the trail behind the frosted-glass frontage of a branch of Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation (RCBC) in the country’s financial centre, Makati, in the capital of Manila. There, the Senate committee was told, the branch manager used what may have been dummy accounts to receive the stolen money and then transferred it to the remittance company. The manager refused to answer many of the committee’s questions for fear of incriminating herself, and her superiors refused to answer some because the law protects the secrecy of bank accounts—even, it seems, fake ones.
If the senators failed to get the answers they wanted, they knew why. In 2013 Congress amended the Anti-Money Laundering Act. The amendments were only tough enough to ensure that an international watchdog, the Financial Action Task Force, would not put the Philippines on its blacklist of untrustworthy countries—for that would have constricted the flow of remittances from millions of Filipino migrant workers that keeps the economy afloat. Casinos were specifically excluded from the new legislation and are consequently exempt from reporting on their operations or on specific players.
As it stands, the law suits the political establishment nicely. In her column on March 18th the editor of the Philippine Star, Ana Marie Pamintuan, described the Senate as the “upper chamber of the nation’s biggest and most successful Laundromat”—encapsulating the insalubrious entanglement of money and politics in the Philippines, as politicians take from the public purse and wash the money clean.
But as domestic and international condemnation has grown about how the stolen money was laundered through the Philippines, the country’s gaming regulator says he is amenable to the AMLC extending its reach to the casinos. The governor of the central bank also laments the Philippines’ lax regime to counter money laundering. A government spokesman, on the other hand, appeared unruffled by the disappearance of the loot. “On the whole,” he explained helpfully, “you can see the system is working.”