By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas

A client-friend called me up the other day for some work on his debtors. They owe him hundreds of thousands of pesos, guaranteed by postdated checks. When he came over, I was shocked totlearn the checks were issued to guarantee loans he granted at the whopping or shocking usurious rate of 5% a month. Compute that for a year and it will come up to 60% per year. It is rapacious.
The debtors were small business people and got sort of misty eyed on the prospect of making it big in so short a time. But lacking capital, they resorted to obtaining capital from the usual 5-6 person in the neighborhood. Borrowing around P250,000.00 to expand her rice retailing business, one of the debtors would have to shell out P12,500.00 every month to pay the interest. What about her other costs? The family’s daily expenses?
And she could not get away from it, having issued the post-dated checks.
The other debtor was quite enterprising but perhaps due to lack of education, she did not have a realistic projection on how her business will go. She thought she could make as much as my client-lender. Her concept was, she borrows around P500,000.00 at 5% interest per month then she lends them out to her fellow retailer-neighbors at the public market at 10% per month. But she did not factor in bad debts or those who will default on their payments which was very likely considering they only have small or micro businesses and they surely could not afford to pay that very high, immoral kind of interest.
Expectedly, both debtors could not pay the monthly payments and their checks bounced. And my client wanted me to write demand letters cum notices that the checks they issued bounced due to lack of funds or their accounts were already closed due to their having issued bad checks several times in the past.
In the course of our conversation, I found out that my client was being financed by a rich Chinese businesswoman who, having borrowed hundreds of millions of pesos from the banks to put up a big hotel and a first class restaurant whose charges could cause a customer to suffer a heart attack, she also has to enter into all sorts of deals to make money. She is even a dealer of construction materials while exercising a very lucrative profession, the kind where people die unless they her professional fees.
Certainly, she was living high and amassing money is her religion.
So I told my client, “I will draft and send the demand letters on one condition. Tell your financier that you will only collect half of the interest and allow the debtors to slowly pay the principal. After all, she made a lot of money from them already.”
Then I explained to him that I know how difficult it is to get out from such debts as I had been through it in the past. Then I tried to scare him by relating how Jesus Christ drove away the usurers from the temple. I topped it off by saying that his business is making him accumulate bad karma that will make him reap some grave consequences. “Matindi ang balik niyan, brod,” I said. I know a number of people who were in that kind of business and their families had to suffer incurable diseases, misfortune, etc.
And to make sure he was scared, I ended by saying, “The Bible even says several generations of your family might have to suffer.”
But I don’t know if he got scared enough.**