Of the hundreds of messages from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) sent to Rizal Commercial
Banking Corporation (RCBC) on 9 February, the bank said, it did not receive any high priority notes from Bangladesh Bank, asking to freeze transactions related to the $81-million bank heist, Philippines’ social news network site Rappler.com reported on Tuesday.
“The requests from the Bank of Bangladesh were not priority. Some were even vague,” RCBC head of legal and regulatory affairs Maria Cecilia Estavillo told the Senate blue ribbon committee on Tuesday, according to the report.
The RCBC official said the bank’s Settlements Department received a total of 790 messages from SWIFT on 9 February, of which 111 were from the Bangladesh Bank and were authenticated free format messages of “normal priority.”
A SWIFT code on 4 February was sent to RCBC, ordering an inward remittance of $81 million to the Philippines from Bangladesh Bank.
On 9 February, RCBC received a SWIFT code from Bangladesh Bank requesting for a refund or putting the funds on hold if they had been transferred or freeze them for proper investigation, after finding out that unknown hackers breached the computer systems of Bangladesh Bank.
“Since there were more than 700 messages and none of the messages from the Bangladesh Bank were of high priority, they were read in sequential order,” Estavillo said during the hearing.
But for Senator Teofisto “TG” Guingona III, it is not every day that a private bank will receive a message from a foreign central bank.
“By just looking at the SWIFT code, you’ll know it comes from a central bank. And it’s not every day you’ll get messages from them,” Guingona told Estavillo.
The RCBC lawyer said that they did not know at first that it was from Bangladesh Bank.
Asked for validation, Nenita Cadapan, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) SWIFT messaging officer-in-charge, told the Senate that a receiver of the SWIFT message would know which bank and from what locality it is from through a “bic code.”
Cadapan said Bangladesh Bank cannot send a high-priority “MT 192” stop payment request to RCBC because “it is not its corresponding bank. They have no relations.”
“The best option for Bangladesh Bank is to send free format messages, which is what it did,” the BSP officer added. “But this doesn’t mean messages from Bangladesh Bank are less persuasive. They [RCBC] should check it.”
Per regulations, before any dollar remittance enters the Philippines, it has to pass through US correspondent banks. In this case, these are Wells Fargo Mellon Bank, Citibank, and Bank of New York.
From the 3 correspondent banks, the $81 million did not enter the RCBC Jupiter branch directly, but was first coursed through RCBC’s Settlement Division, which is part of the head office.
“Our Settlement Division did not receive any high-priority stop payment requests from the corresponding banks also,” Estavillo said.
Brussels-based SWIFT, a cooperative owned by some 3,000 global financial institutions, does not transfer funds, but sends payment instructions between institutions’ accounts, using codes, Rappler.com reported.
Source: Prothom Alo
