Crime and banishment

Crime and banishment
By Conrado Banal III Philippine Daily Inquirer

Hardly anybody knew that high-profile lawyer Lorna Patajo-Kapunan also represented billionaire Stanley Ho, the Macau casino tycoon who once attempted to operate a “floating” (i.e. boat) casino in Manila.

Kapunan also represented a doctor by the name of Hayden Kho in that high-profile case about lewd videos, and a basketball superstar named James Yap in a messy marital spat with a certain television celebrity called Kris Aquino, who shares the same surname as our leader Benigno Simeon (aka BS).

Anyway, regarding her Stanley Ho connection, hardly anybody in the business community knew that, only last year, Kapunan found herself as one of the defendants in a multimillion-dollar securities fraud case in New York.

Reportedly, huge hedge funds accused a company named Elixir Gaming Technologies of making misleading (read this as “bloated”) statements on its prospects, which of course led the hedge funds to invest in the company.

Elixir Gaming Technologies, a slot machine distribution company, was actually listed on the American stock exchange. Eventually, after the funds invested in Elixir, the share price of the company fell by more than 90 percent.

The hedge funds were asking the court in the United States to award “compensatory damages plus interest.”

Kapunan was one of the directors of Elixir, together with Lawrence Ho, one of the sons of Stanley Ho.

In the court case, the complainants claimed that she personally met with the representatives of the hedge funds to convince them to invest in Elixir.

Now, in the United States, cases on securities fraud have not been taken lightly in the past 80 or so years, or since the stock market crash prior to the Great Depression.

In that country, they actually litigate thousands upon thousands of securities fraud cases, a number of which had something to do with bloated forecasts for profits of listed companies.

How come we do not see a lot of those cases here? Don’t tell me all the listed companies in the Philippines are honest in their reports.