Digging A Deeper Hole
The Bautistas are only digging themselves an even deeper hole. Here's why:
1. It is clear that Andy is lying. At first he says that he is unsure of the amount of cash and properties his estranged wife was claiming, and now his brother has practically admitted that their family owns 20 million dollars (1 billion pesos) worth of properties and cash from varied investments? At one point Andy even claimed that some of these passbooks and documents were fake. If Andy was the designated family fund manager, how can he not be aware of the total amount his family has? Why did it take so long for his brother to suddenly come out of nowhere and make this outrageous claim?
2. It's actually easy to check if such claims are true. Profits and returns from various investments should reflect in the family's income tax returns. Where were these investments made? In the Philippines? In the US? A simple check in the IRS and the BIR will suffice. Did they pay the right amount of taxes? Commensurate to what they claim they "earned" legally from various investments?
3. No sane minded fund manager will keep his family's fortune in a small regional bank such as the LDB, in multiple accounts under the same branch, and keep the daily transactions well below the threshold of Php 500,000 unless he was deliberately hiding these funds and was avoiding AMLC detection.
4. No expert fund manager with the extraordinary ability to grow his family's investment to such humongous proportions can ever be this stupid, coming up with such flimsy alibis that will not hold water given the simplest checks.
5. No intelligent fund manager will keep all these passbooks and documents together with BDSM equipment locked inside a closet in a house he shares with his estranged wife. Or leave gift wrapped bundles of cash lying around the kitchen or dining table like early Christmas presents. The least Andy Bautista could have done was act like Fidel Ramos or Jesse Robredo - clean as the Lord's resurrection - with absolutely no trace in sight.
But then again, really, how do you hide a billion fucking bucks?
See Phil Star article here.
