Beware of disloyal friends

Swimming coach Anthony Lozada rang an alarm the other day to warn friends not to be too trusting in deals involving money matters. Lozada’s swim school was recently robbed of P3.5 Million allegedly by an employee now in the custody of police in the Manila City Jail.

Lozada’s father Bert established the family’s swimming school in 1956 but it wasn’t until the late 1980s that the institution became almost a household name. It’s now a tradition that kids who want to learn to swim, especially during the summer months, troop to Lozada’s pools in Metro Manila, Batangas, Laguna, Bulacan, Cavite and Negros Occidental. Enrollment is up to about 5,000 a year, not counting the students supervised by Lozada teachers in PE classes in schools like Xavier and St. Paul’s College in Pasig.

Today, the Bert Lozada Swimming School is run by his sons Anthony as chief executive officer and Angelo as chief operating officer.

“Our father passed away in 2009,” said Anthony. “While he was bed-ridden battling cancer, we didn’t realize that our accounting and operations manager took advantage of his failing health by making him sign unauthorized checks. Unfortunately, we didn’t have our controls in place and trusted our manager completely. We didn’t have checks and balances.”

Anthony said the first sign of something wrong flashed when a former schoolmate of Angelo’s wife Kristine brought up a problem from a Lozada school in Nueva Vizcaya. “We were surprised because we don’t have a school in Nueva Vizcaya,” said Anthony. “We investigated the matter and found out that our manager put up a school on her own, using our logo, our curriculum and even some of our former teachers.”

A deeper investigation into the manager’s lifestyle revealed extravagances that weren’t in proportion to her monthly salary of about P40,000, including bonuses and incentives. “We discovered that while she used to commute to work before, she was now driven by a chauffeur in her own car to school,” said Anthony. “We found out a daughter had a date with her boyfriend in Malaysia. We found out she had a condo. How could she afford all of these things?”

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The lifestyle check led the Lozadas to contract an external auditor to track the school’s income stream and disbursements. “As of last count, we were missing about P3.5 Million,” said Anthony. “We immediately brought up the case to the CIDG (Criminal Investigation and Detection Group).”

The police went into action quickly and after a thorough investigation, determined a “modus operandi” that bilked the Lozadas initially of P1.9 Million. An arrest order was issued by judge Ruben Roxas of the Regional Trial Court, Fourth Judicial Region, Branch 12, Manila. The manager, a 50-year-old widow from Isabela, was arrested with her two daughters as accomplices in Santiago City by a police team led by Villaflor Bannawagan.

Police senior superintendent Ronald Estilles filed a report saying the manager had full access to the school’s funds and was found to have altered checks by “inserting words and figures that pads or increases the originally indicated amounts and figures … she then encashed them or deposited them under her account or that of her daughter or to some other unauthorized account, there by stealing the difference or the amount from the school.”

Estilles said the manager’s functions and responsibilities included overseeing the financial condition of the school as well as seeing to it that its swimming programs were in place and conducted efficiently. As accounting manager, she prepared the checks and vouchers supporting the school’s transactions. She was also responsible for determining the company’s financial obligations to government agencies and employees. “She had full access to the funds of the school and the office where its equipment was stored,” said Estilles.

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Additionally, Anthony said the manager was involved in human relations, particularly in cases of employees’ applying for loans. “It was her way to make certain employees loyal to her,” he added.

Anthony said the manager has not apologized for the crime. “No apology, no remorse,” he noted. “It appears that she’s a real pro. We don’t know if she had done this to others in the past.  She and her daughters worked with us for a few years.  She was recommended by a former employee. One of her daughters was a teacher and another, a coordinator. It’s our policy to encourage families to work with us. We want to bring this case out in the open as a warning. Our mistake was we trusted her too much. We are now in the process of attaching assets and recovering what she stole from the school. We are going all the way in giving her what she deserves. We want to set an example that crime doesn’t pay.”

The alleged mastermind is in jail with a recommended bail of P1.7 Million. Her two daughters are now out on bail. One got off on a bail of P154,000 and the other, P26,000. One of the daughters is a professor of law in a university. The police determined the alleged crime to be qualified theft and qualified theft with falsification of commercial documents.