The Philippine Deposit Insurance (PDIC) Corporation has hired the services of an audit firm that specializes in forensic fraud investigation to further bolster its Legacy Group probe.

PDIC president Jose Nograles said in a statement that fraud experts from the auditing firm of Punongbayan & Araullo (P&A) has been brought in to assist in uncover Legacy's transactions, especially those purposely hidden through a maze of paper trails and deleted computer files.

P&A will also identify and document possible fraud schemes, irregularities and anomalies that may have been perpetrated against the banks by its officers and which may be used as additional basis for the filing of criminal or civil cases.

The initial coverage of the investigation will focus on bank transactions for the past 5 years for 12 of the 13 Legacy rural banks. Rural Bank of Parañaque, Inc., another Legacy rural bank, will investigated for fraudulent acts for the past 10 years. These will complement PDIC's initial investigations that involved combing through 2,000 boxes of documents from the bankrupt and closed Legacy banks.

Nograles said their ongoing investigations have revealed "schemes of a different level of sophistication, requiring more expertise and in-depth investigations to unravel."

"We are dealing not just with individual banks, but with a group of companies composed of several banks and pre-need companies controlled by certain persons through dummy ownerships, enmeshed in a criss-crossing labyrinth of transactions. The endless combinations and permutations of these transactions have created a veritable empire of smoke and mirrors meant to cover up fraud and confuse regulators and the public alike," Nograles said.

P&A has already started poring over 26 cases, which are considered "leads." Once untangled, these could explain and unravel other fraudulent transactions, thus could result in filing of additional cases.

P&A, which is affiliated with global firm Grant Thornton, is one of the few--if not the only--local firm with expertise in forensic fraud investigation, a globally utilized effort to establish fraud. It has a Business Risk Services unit, where two partners are members of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE). The ACFE is an international organization that certifies fraud examiners. Four of the 5 senior managers leading the 60 personnel assigned to PDIC are ACFE members.

The PDIC and the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas have previously filed several syndicated estafa cases against Legacy's top officials, including its owner Celso de los Angeles, for supposedly defrauding thousands of depositors nationwide.

The Justice Department, which is tasked to integrate cases filed by various government agencies, has started the process of filing these cases in the court. Only then could the properties of Legacy owner Celso de los Angeles and other officers be attached.

PDIC also asked P&A to help trace and recover assets so the deposit insurer could lay claim to the properties of De los Angeles and other persons found to have committed fraud.