The Philippine Daily Inquirer reports that the Philippine Bureau of Customs has filed charges that Oillink, an import company, cheated the government out of 700 million Philippine pesos (16 million US dollars). The Bureau of Customs discovered the fraud through an anonymous letter, apparently from a disgruntled employee. In a column, Raul Palabrica says, "It takes a lot of guts for a person to provide inside information to the authorities that could lead to the imprisonment of the people he once worked with or whose table he may have shared on several occasions." "And once the whistle is blown, there is no assurance that the whistle-blower will not be caught in the maelstrom that his action may have caused," Palabrica adds. He also comments on the predicament of UBS whistleblower Brad Birkenfeld. Birkenfeld’s disclosures, he says,
resulted in the rest of the safe banking havens based in Lichtenstein, Cayman Islands and other exotic places into doing something similar under pain of being accused of money laundering and blacklisted in the international banking community.
So you think the whistle-blower was declared a hero for initiating the action that practically turned upside down tax haven banks?
No! Instead, he was tried and found guilty of abetting tax evasion and sentenced to 40 months in jail.
That is suffering for speaking truth to power.
