Celso de los Angeles, the principal suspect in a scam that used a network of rural banks to bilk thousands of depositors of billions of pesos died Tuesday morning of cancer.
De los Angeles’ lawyer, Noel Malaya, and Philip Piccio of the PEP Coalition, which had been helping victims of the so-called Legacy scam, said he died at the St. Luke’s Medical Center in Quezon City, where he had been under hospital arrest for several cases of syndicated estafa (fraud).
In light of this development, PEP is studying the possibility of filing charges against De los Angeles’ wife and son instead.
De los Angeles founded the Legacy Group, which operated rural banks, a pre-need firm and financing companies that offered high interest rates to lure in clients, many of them small merchants, wage earners, tricycle drivers and pensioners.
When the network collapsed, it reportedly owed as much as 30 billion pesos to some 130,000 depositors.