2 immigration officers face raps for allegedly faking travel records of ex-Wirecard exec

The National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) has filed a criminal complaint against two immigration officers who allegedly falsified the travel records of a former executive of German payments firm Wirecard.

The NBI said "spurious" immigration records on the travel of former Wirecard COO Jan Marsalek to and from the Philippines last June appear to have been meant to mislead the European authorities pursuing him. 

Agents recommended the prosecution of immigration officers Perry Michael Pancho and Marcus Nicodemus for falsification of public documents by a public official and violation of the Code of Conduct and Ethical Standards for Public Officials and Employees in relation to the anti-graft law.

Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra said in June that there were records of Marsalek arriving in the country on June 23 and leaving for China on June 24. He later said the records were found to have been falsified.

Wirecard's missing 1.9 billion euros (USD2.1 billion) was alleged to have been placed in two Philippine banks, but Banco de Oro and the Bank of the Philippine Islands denied this. The Bangko Sentral also said none of the money entered the country's financial system.

In a statement on Thursday, the NBI said Marsalek's arrival records were inconsistent with existing immigration protocols in the time of COVID-19 and lacked an actual scanned data page of his passport, among others.

His departure records also lacked the same passport page but contained a page of an unknown passport stamped by the Bureau of Quarantine, the NBI said. In addition, the bureau said immigration counters were unmanned because there were no flights at the time.

The NBI also claimed that Pancho, the immigration officer, was not in the list of on-duty personnel on June 24 and must have gone "beyond his duty" to encode the entry.

The NBI further alleged that Pancho encoded a departure record for Marsalek despite a prior derogatory record check that was found to have been "cancelled by user" — another immigration officer — to notify the next officer to "act accordingly."

Immigration officer Darren Ilagan, who processed the supposed arrival at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport, told the NBI that he had been ordered by his supervisor, Nicodemus, to conduct the derogatory record check.

He said he immediately encoded "cancelled by user" upon realizing that it was "wrong" in order to "notify the next immigration officer to act accordingly."

"[Ilagan] added that it was after a few days when he realized that he was made a victim of a 'pabokol scheme' where some of his co-workers and superiors made a seemingly harmless and significant request for their personal interests and benefits," the NBI said.

The NBI said there are no indications that Marsalek, who was confirmed to have been briefly in the Philippines last March, is still in the country.

"The entries on the BI records for June 23 and 24, 2020, both spurious, appear to be mere diversionary in order to divert the attention of the authorities in Europe to focus its attention in the Philippines and not in their jurisdiction," it said. —KBK, GMA News