"x x x.
The petitions for review lack merit. Hence, we affirm the ruling of the CA.
PNB’s act of releasing the proceeds of the check prior to the lapse of the 15-day clearing period was the proximate cause of the loss.
“Proximate cause is ‘that cause, which, in natural and continuous sequence, unbroken by any efficient intervening cause, produces the injury and without which the result would not have occurred.’ x x x To determine the proximate cause of a controversy, the question that needs to be asked is: If the event did not happen, would the injury have resulted? If the answer is no, then the event is the proximate cause.”[34]
Here, while PNB highlights Ofelia’s fault in accommodating a stranger’s check and depositing it to the bank, it remains mum in its release of the proceeds thereof without exhausting the 15-day clearing period, an act which contravened established banking rules and practice.
It is worthy of notice that the 15-day clearing period alluded to is construed as 15 banking days. As declared by Josephine Estella, the Administrative Service Officer who was the bank’s Remittance Examiner, what was unusual in the processing of the check was that the “lapse of 15 banking days was not observed.”[35] Even PNB’s agreement with Philadelphia National Bank[36] regarding the rules on the collection of the proceeds of US dollar checks refers to “business/ banking days.” Ofelia deposited the subject check on November 4, 1992 . Hence, the 15th banking day from the date of said deposit should fall on November 25, 1992 . However, what happened was that PNB Buendia Branch, upon calling up Ofelia that the check had been cleared, allowed the proceeds thereof to be withdrawn on November 17 and 18, 1992, a week before the lapse of the standard 15-day clearing period.
This Court already held that the payment of the amounts of checks without previously clearing them with the drawee bank especially so where the drawee bank is a foreign bank and the amounts involved were large is contrary to normal or ordinary banking practice.[37] Also, in Associated Bank v. Tan,[38] wherein the bank allowed the withdrawal of the value of a check prior to its clearing, we said that “[b]efore the check shall have been cleared for deposit, the collecting bank can only ‘assume’ at its own risk x x x that the check would be cleared and paid out.” The delay in the receipt by PNB Buendia Branch of the November 13, 1992 SWIFT message notifying it of the dishonor of the subject check is of no moment, because had PNB Buendia Branch waited for the expiration of the clearing period and had never released during that time the proceeds of the check, it would have already been duly notified of its dishonor. Clearly, PNB’s disregard of its preventive and protective measure against the possibility of being victimized by bad checks had brought upon itself the injury of losing a significant amount of money.
It bears stressing that “the diligence required of banks is more than that of a Romanpater familias or a good father of a family. The highest degree of diligence is expected.”[39] PNB miserably failed to do its duty of exercising extraordinary diligence and reasonable business prudence. The disregard of its own banking policy amounts to gross negligence, which the law defines as “negligence characterized by the want of even slight care, acting or omitting to act in a situation where there is duty to act, not inadvertently but wilfully and intentionally with a conscious indifference to consequences in so far as other persons may be affected.”[40] With regard to collection or encashment of checks, suffice it to say that the law imposes on the collecting bank the duty to scrutinize diligently the checks deposited with it for the purpose of determining their genuineness and regularity. “The collecting bank, being primarily engaged in banking, holds itself out to the public as the expert on this field, and the law thus holds it to a high standard of conduct.”[41] A bank is expected to be an expert in banking procedures and it has the necessary means to ascertain whether a check, local or foreign, is sufficiently funded.
Incidentally, PNB obliges the spouses Cheah to return the withdrawn money under the principle of solutio indebiti, which is laid down in Article 2154 of the Civil Code:[42]
Art. 2154. If something is received when there is no right to demand it, and it was unduly delivered through mistake, the obligation to return it arises.
“[T]he indispensable requisites of the juridical relation known as solutio indebiti,are, (a) that he who paid was not under obligation to do so; and (b) that the payment was made by reason of an essential mistake of fact.[43]
In the case at bench, PNB cannot recover the proceeds of the check under the principle it invokes. In the first place, the gross negligence of PNB, as earlier discussed, can never be equated with a mere mistake of fact, which must be something excusable and which requires the exercise of prudence. No recovery is due if the mistake done is one of gross negligence.
x x x."
