A corporation can be entirely legitimate and still be peddling an entirely illegal offering, because the law demands two different registrations for two different things: one for the company, another for whatever it sells as an investment
The Securities and Exchange Commission answers to two masters, and it refuses to let either one overrule the other. One is growth: a capital market open to innovation, to new ways of raising funds, to businesses hungry to expand. The other is protection: an unwavering guard over every peso the public risks on that growth. Where a weaker regulator might treat these as competing instincts, the Commission treats them as one job wearing two faces. Say yes to innovation. Never say yes to fraud borrowing its name.
That guard begins with a distinction the public rarely hears explained. Dermacare was a validly registered corporation. MFT Group was too. What neither company registered was the product itself, the investment contract sold to the public, which the Securities Regulation Code treats as a security in its own right, separate from the paperwork that merely proves a company exists.
Securities and Exchange CommissionA corporation can be entirely legitimate and still be peddling an entirely illegal offering, because the law demands two different registrations for two different things: one for the company, another for whatever it sells as an investment. Skip the second, and a guaranteed return reaches the public without ever having to answer, under oath and under audit, where that return is supposed to come from. Closing that gap, faster and harder than before, is the mission of the Enforcement and Investor Protection Department. As the schemes multiply, so must the department built to meet them.
Dermacare and Mica Tan prove the department is not bluffing. In 2024, EIPD filed criminal complaints against Dermacare's Chanda Atienza and Venus Gonda for selling an unregistered investment, a franchise partnership dangling a guaranteed 12.6 percent return every quarter for five years, wrapped in complimentary salon services.
When the two ran to Malaysia, the Commission struck first, securing a court order that canceled their passports this past February. That order triggered an Interpol red notice, and by August, Malaysian authorities had them in custody; their return to Philippine soil on September 5 closed the loop.
Maria Francesca Tan is still being hunted, and that too is the machinery working, not failing.
A Taguig court has charged her with the identical trio of violations, selling unregistered securities, defrauding investors, dealing without a license, while a Batangas court has separately ordered her arrest for syndicated estafa, no bail allowed.
Interpol issued her own red notice in May, at the Commission's request, one more door closing on wherever she is hiding. Neither case was built on paperwork alone or manhunt alone. Each demanded a record precise enough, section by section, to give the manhunt something worth chasing.
A conviction is not the finish line, and the Commission does not pretend otherwise. The same case built to put a face behind bars is built, just as deliberately, to chase down whatever remains of the money, bank balances, properties, anything not yet spent or hidden, before it slips into the next scheme waiting down the line. A prosecution that ends in a guilty verdict but leaves the investor holding an empty bag has done only half its job. The Commission's aim is not simply to say a fraud was punished. It is to make sure that when the paperwork finally closes, there is still something left to hand back to the people who trusted the promise in the first place.
This is the balance the Commission refuses to apologize for: a capital market thrown open to the businesses the country needs, guarded by an enforcement arm too sharp to let fraud walk through the same door. Innovation earns room to grow. It does not earn the benefit of the doubt.
