
MANILA Can a multimillion-dollar dirty money transaction be orchestrated by a retail bank branch manager? Rizal Commercial Banking Corp., the former employer of Maia Santos-Deguito, would have you believe it can.

On March 22, RCBC fired Deguito, the former manager of the bank's Jupiter Makati branch who finds herself at the center of an $81 million bank heist -- the one successful stage of an audacious attempt to steal $951 million from the foreign reserves of Bangladesh's central bank at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.