The money was collected from senior students of the Philippine Normal University for their graduation ball and had been entrusted to Jayson Dalde, 19, the treasurer of the school’s seniors’ committee.
The teenager, a resident of Marikina City, was charged with qualified theft after the discovery of his attempt to attribute to burglars the loss of the P400,000 in cash, as well as receipts of expenses incurred by the committee and student payment records.
Improbable
Manila Police District Theft and Robbery section head Chief Insp. Edgardo Carpio said Dalde’s co-members of the committee found his story improbable, and accused him of stealing the sum and the financial documents to conceal the crime.
In his complaint, seniors’ committee auditor Ray Mark Cariquez said the theft happened between 5:30 p.m. of Feb. 20 and 4 p.m. of Feb. 23 at the committee office on the ground floor of BP Sibayan Hall inside the university.
Cariquez said he was told about the stolen cash by committee president Christopher Palabay, based on a report given to him by Dalde.
Puzzling
What Cariquez, however, found puzzling was Dalde’s hesitation in reporting the “burglary” to the police.
The treasurer’s subsequent actions aroused the committee’s suspicion when he failed five times to attend a meeting he set to count the total collection from the students .
Cariquez told police investigators that he recalled Dalde telling him before the incident—around the third week of February—that there was a “big deficit” in the funds.
The theft and robbery section chief said some of the money and documents had been kept inside a filing cabinet in the office. Initially, only Dalde held the key to the cabinet.
Deficit
It was only the week before the missing funds and documents were discovered—the same week when Dalde had approached Cariquez regarding the “big fund deficit”—when duplicates were given to the auditor and the committee adviser.
“There was an apparent attempt to pin the blame on someone else in the organization,” Carpio said.
After Cariquez conducted an audit, he discovered that the cash was missing after he checked the actual receipts he kept of payments made by the graduating students.
David Mikael Taclino
Inyu Web Development and Design
Creative Writer
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