Metro Manila (CNN Philippines) — The Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. (RCBC) has appointed Gil Buenaventura as its new president and chief executive officer (CEO) following the resignation of it’s president in the wake of the money laundering scandal involving the bank.
Read: RCBC President Lorenzo Tan resigns
In an announcement on Monday (May 16), RCBC said the 63-year-old bank executive currently heads the Development Bank of the Philippines, where he is president and CEO. Buenaventura will assume his post in in RCBC on July 1, it said.
Buenaventura has also held the top posts of some of the country’s largest financial institutions like the Bank of the Philippine Islands, where he served as senior executive vice president and chief operating officer, and Citytrust Banking Corp., where he was its executive vice president.
Buenaventura replaces Lorenzo Tan, who resigned in early May.
In a separate statement earlier, the bank acknowledged that under Tan’s term, RCBC’s customer base expanded from 800,000 to 7.32 million, while its branch network grew from 294 to 475 branches. Its balance sheet likewise strengthened, more than doubling from P224 billion to P488 billion.
However, Tan was also the RCBC chief that fateful day in February, when hackers stole $81 million from Bangladesh Bank and wired the money to four RCBC accounts in the bank’s Jupiter branch in Makati.
Despite stop orders from the Bangladesh central bank, the money was cleared and credited to the accounts, then quickly withdrawn and delivered to local casinos.
“Despite having been cleared of any wrongdoing, as President and CEO of RCBC, I take full moral responsibility for this sad incident in the history of the bank,” Tan said in a statement.
