TWO Australians were arrested on orders of the Regional Trial Court (RTC) yesterday and will now stand trial for allegedly defrauding investors in a stocks-related business.
John Allan Watters and Steve Faris Antonio were taken into custody inside their rented apartment on M. Velez St. yesterday morning and will be held until they post a total
of P300,000 in bail.
Special Investigator Arnel Pura of the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) 7, in a report to Judge Gabriel Ingles, said the two men “peacefully submitted themselves” when they were served the arrest orders.
Interviewed at the NBI headquarters, Watters and Antonio said they tried to post bail yesterday afternoon but were not able to as Ingles, who issued the arrest warrants last Dec. 16, had yet to sign their commitment order.
It was the NBI that lodged the complaint Judge Ingles issued the warrant for.
Operatives from the agency arrested the two in an entrapment in August last year, for allegedly selling stocks of a cancer treatment center in the US to people here, without a license from local authorities and then allegedly misappropriating what would otherwise be their investors’ income.
They were, according to their lawyer, detained for 21 days.
They were arrested, said the NBI, in the act of receiving $5,000 from complainant Jose Rodion Uy for 5,000 additional shares of the company Health Source Technologies, a US-based cancer treatment firm that, the two told clients, was poised to expand to the Philippines.
The entrapment came as follow-up to complaints lodged before the NBI by two other Filipinos and an American who said they invested a total of $88,000 in the firm, through Waters and Antonio.
Uy, together with Noel Velasquez and American Michael Evan Landy, signed complaint sheets and, with the exception of Velasquez, issued affidavits accusing the two Australian businessmen of defrauding them by not turning over earnings from the stocks or returning their investments despite demand.
Uy said he bought his stocks on Jan. 29, 2008, investing $50,000 or P2,388,500 at the current rate, with the promise of returns within six months.
Landy, on the other hand, said he shelled out $20,000 last Dec. 13, 2007. The amount was wired directly to Watters via a bank in Singapore and he was promised returns by June 30 of the following year.
Both said they made demands which were ignored, with the Australians supposedly advising them to hold out a few more months until their stocks’ values rise.
The two said they did but there was no indication that they were going to get either the proceeds of their purchase or their money back.
Uy and Landy said they recently found out that the certificate for their purchase of stocks from HST Global have been cancelled but re-issued to the name of Watters alone.
“(This) was done without our prior knowledge and consent,” they both said.
The entrapment was carried out on the pretext that Uy intended to purchase $5,000 more of HST Global shares.
Watters and Antonio have denied the charge.
Through their lawyer, Atty. Giovanni Luna, they said businessman Rodion Uy only wanted to get the money he invested back.
They could not do that, they said, because the stocks Uy had invested it in were, at that time, worth less than the original value because of the recession.
“(Uy) knew all he could get was the existing value of his stocks. With the economy in the US now, he cannot get the same amount. So he had my clients entrapped so they would be forced to pay,” Luna said in an interview days following the arrest.
A stockbroker in Singapore denied there was any anomaly.
“There was no scam going on. I want to put that on record. Because when you say scam, trading has been going on and people are being fooled. There is only a complaint coming from a single individual. Other people might have the impression that there is indeed a scam,” he stress
