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“If governments did not mislead their citizens so often,
there would be less need for secrecy, and if leaders
knew they could not rely on keeping the public in the
dark about what they are doing, they would have a
powerful incentive to behave better.“
Peter Singer
It is only the fifth month of the year yet several
financial scandals have hugged the headlines of
broadsheets in the Philippines.
In February, hackers successfully moved US $81
million from the Bangladeshi’s account with the
Federal Reserve Bank to a Philippine universal
bank. The funds could have finally found their way
to casinos and elsewhere. The matter is still under
investigation by the Society for Worldwide Interbank
Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a supersecure
system that banks use to authorize payments from
one account to another. (One analyst describes
SWIFT as the Rolls-Royce of payments networks.)
Also probing on the heist are the Philippine senate
and the Bangladeshi government.
Early April 2016, the burning issue on business news,
print and electronic, was the 11.5 million documents
leaked from a Panama-based law firm, Mossack
Fonseca, on the “secret or confidential” offshore
financial transactions of world leaders, celebrities,
and sports stars. Some of the who’s who and the
elite of the world were named “beneficiaries” or
“players”. The documents were supposed to have
ON FINANCIAL
SECRECY & LEAKS
By CONCHITA L. MANABAT, President of the Development Center for Finance and a Trustee of the FINEX Development
& Research Founda!on. A past Chair of Interna!onal Associa!on of Financial Execu!ves Ins!tutes (IAFEI), she now
serves as the Chairperson of the Advisory Council of the said organiza!on. She is also a member of the Advisory Group
of the Interna!onal Ethics Standards Board for Accountants. Ar!cle as of July 2016
PHILIPPINES