A plea agreement was reached yesterday between the Attorney General’s Office and Juan S. Torres who entered into a guilty plea for violation of the CNMI Banking Act, according to a press statement from defense lawyer Robert J. O’Connor.<\/p>\n
His guilty plea handed him a minor punishment of misdemeanor, which would only require community service and a fine of $3,000.<\/p>\n
The former president of the Bank of Saipan approved a $50,000 loan in 1996 to the Torres Egg Farm without the full board’s approval. Although, the Torres Egg Farm is a family-owned company, he did not own a single stock when the loan was processed.<\/p>\n
According to the press statement, as the bank president, he was allowed to approve loans up to $100,000.<\/p>\n
“Based upon that blanket of approval, I thought the loan to the Egg Farm was OK ….Apparently my assumption was incorrect and I agreed to take responsibility for being in technical violation of the law,” Torres said.<\/p>\n
O’Connor said the company paid the loan in full and ahead of schedule.<\/p>\n
“The Bank lost no money and there was no victim . This was purely technical violation of the very complicated Banking Act and my client felt it was better for him and his family to plead guilty than to go through a lengthy trial,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A plea agreement was reached yesterday between the Attorney General’s Office and Juan S. Torres who entered into a guilty plea for violation of the CNMI Banking Act, according to a press statement from defense lawyer Robert J. O’Connor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46546\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}