Too many people are in a rush to bury the festering carcass of the Legacy Group, while the central bank is only beginning to dissect the cadaver. We must caution against burying the problem with unseemly haste, on one hand, and letting it rot in public for too long, on the other. The Legacy Group scandal has tainted the banking and pre-need sectors, and exposed just how thoroughly our economic and political institutions are tainted by corruption and cozy insider deals. The list of conspirators and culprits is too long to justify anything but a thorough investigation that results in reforms and people going to jail.

Which is not what the House of Representatives seems to want. From the time the rural banking sector began to be disturbed by allegations of insider deals and tainted balance sheets, congressmen tried putting pressure on the BSP to relax the rules and give the wobbling rural banks a free pass. Why they were so keen on relaxing rules meant to protect public confidence in the banking system became clear enough from the personal and business relationships congressmen, like Speaker Prospero Nograles Jr., had with Legacy’s top honcho, Celso de los Angeles.

The vested interests of congressmen aside, others, too, have a vested interest in disposing of the Legacy Group scandal and moving on. Philippine Deposit Insurance Corp. (PDIC), headed by the Speaker’s brother, wants to start paying deposit insurance to depositors. And yet investigators suggest that these depositors are not innocent victims but rather may be accomplices in a scheme to turn rules meant to protect people who invest in good faith, into a clever scheme for risk-free investing at public expense.

The BSP, for its part, wants to be prudent in handling the PDIC’s request for a loan to pay its obligations, on the sound principle that government shouldn’t willy-nilly assume obligations that were part and parcel of the whole Legacy scheme to twist consumer protection rules and turn them into a means for payback for cronies.

The House of Representatives, or its members who were friends, business partners, and investors in the Legacy Group, and the PDIC headed by the brother of one of the most prominent investors in the Legacy Group all need the PDIC to start paying deposit insurance, because only in that manner can their and their friends’ losses be minimized. This is the danger (and the incentive) for quickly tidying up the closure of the Legacy Group’s banks and their accounts.

On the other hand, the central bank, Banko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), which is resisting pressure to throw the book at Celso de los Angeles, and which is going through the paces of an investigation in what it claims is a slow, but sure, manner, runs another risk. That risk is that being too tidy and methodical requires being too slow. Which would lead to public interest waning, and political and other pressure to actually reform the system would thus dissipate. If congressmen and their friends want to move too fast, the BSP can also move too slowly.

What is lacking is recognition of the extent to which so many of those getting in on the Legacy Group act are unfit to even participate in the resolution of this scandal.

There are rules aplenty covering conflicts of interest that ought to have forced congressmen, from the Speaker himself to politicians on both sides of the aisle, to refrain from commenting on the whole thing. For example: Luis Villafuerte, nemesis of the Speaker, has a wife on the Monetary Board which will decide the fate of the loans the PDIC, headed by Nograles’ brother, has requested. Who is to say Villafuerte wouldn’t apply pressure on his wife to put politics and not the public good, first?

And if congressmen had no business posturing on an issue in which some of them either lost money or made money, what more the PDIC continuing to operate under the leadership of the Speaker’s brother, when it seems that the PDIC’s guarantees on deposits was an integral part of the Legacy scheme? Hence the advice to depositors to keep their deposits within the coverage limit of the PDIC — and thus, the reasonable suspicion that the PDIC wants to cover such deposits as a fulfillment of the scheme’s intent to protect investors at the Filipino people’s expense.

There must be a freeze. Stop the payoffs. Focus on De los Angeles. And consider the whole picture — not just the rural banks, but the pre-need buyers, too. To do otherwise is to send the message that the payoff for Legacy’s cronies has begun.