PDIC takes over Rural Bank of Carmen: Four more banks on receivership

CEBU – The Monetary Board of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas has put four more banks under the Legacy Group under receivership yesterday and designated the Philippine Deposit Insurance Commission as the receiver.

One of these banks is the Rural Bank of Carmen in Carmen town of Cebu.

Ferdinand Beluan, PDIC department manager III of the Receivership and Liquidation Department, said that the Rural Bank of Carmen did not declare a bank holiday.

The three others are Nation Bank in Bacolod City, Rural Bank of DARBCI in General Santos City and the Bicol Development Bank in Legaspi City. 

Beluan went to the Bank of Carmen yesterday to personally serve the order of BSP and informed the bank’s management that they are now under receivership. “They have not declared a bank holiday, but we have to serve the order of the Monetary Board,” Beluan told The FREEMAN.

Receivership is defined as the authority given to a person by a court to take over the custody, charge of a property or business etc of someone else, to run the property or business as per the direction issued by the court.

The Bank of Carmen is the 13th bank under the Legacy Group that has been put under receivership by the Monetary Board since December 8.

Of the 13 banks, five are in Cebu — the Philippine Countryside Rural Bank and all its branches, the Pilipino Rural Bank and all its branches, the Rural Bank of Bais (Supreme Bank) in Mandaue City, the Bank of East Asia in Minglanilla and recently the Rural Bank of Carmen.

The five branches of PCRB are in Liloan, Consolacion and in the cities of Lapu-Lapu, Mandaue and Cebu and the two branches of PR Bank in Mandaue and Argao.

PR Bank in Tagbilaran, Bohol has also declared the same.

The six other banks outside Cebu that were put under receivership are the Rural Bank of Bais in Negros Oriental, the Rural Bank of Parañaque, Rural Bank of San Jose, Dynamic Bank in Batangas, San Pablo City Development Bank and the Nation Bank in Bacolod City.

All these banks are under the Legacy Group. They were found by the BSP examiners in July 2007 to have an aggregate undercapitalization of P2.5billion.

BSP then ordered the said banks to be put under receivership, but the bank management filed a case and the Supreme Court ruled last November 24 favoring BSP.

Earlier, the original founders of the rural banks in Cebu have gathered giving a strong signal to their depositors that their financial standing is not affected by the declaration of bank holiday by the Legacy Group banks.

Danilo Arcenas, president of the Cebu Federation of Rural Banks Inc., has assured their depositors that their member-banks are financially capable and are very much stable.

The other rural bankers in Cebu include Johnvic Gullas, acting president of Rural Bank of Toledo, which is owned by Jose Gullas, the owner of the University of Visayas; Augusto Go, owner of ASPAC Bank and University of Cebu; Madridejos Vice Mayor Doroteo Salazar, owner of Salazar Institute of Technology and Rural Bank of Madridejos; and Matias Aznar, owner of Southwestern University and Lapu-Lapu Rural Bank.

BSP director Alberto A. Reyes said that the banks under Legacy Group only represent a tiny fraction of the banking system in the country.

The country has 780 rural banks with over 2,000 branches nationwide.

Beluan added that so far they are still collating and reviewing all the documents of banks under the Legacy Group, for a faster releasing of insurance claims by the depositors.

“We will be back in Cebu on the early part of January. We can assure the depositors that we will soon be releasing claims,” Beluan said. —/NLQ (THE FREEMAN)