Should late dictator be buried as hero? Marcoses' lavish lifestyle and ill-gotten wealth revisited 

 

InterAksyon

Tricia Aquino, InteraAksyon.com
July 4, 2016


MANILA - The inauguration of President Rodrigo Duterte was simple, with a restricted number of guests, modest snacks like maruya (banana fritters), and a short speech. He even went straight to work afterwards, meeting with his Cabinet after administering the mass oath-taking for them.

This shunning of grandeur is in contrast to the regime of the late President Ferdinand Marcos, whom Duterte plans to allow the burial of at the Libingan ng mga Bayani.

                  Provided by InterAksyon

Scholars and survivors of the dictatorship reminded students at the University of the Philippines of the Marcoses’ lavish lifestyle on Friday at the forum “Ang Bangkay ni Duterte” (Duterte’s corpse).

The event was dubbed as “pampublikong lamay para kay Pangulong Marcos bago siya ipalibing ni Pangulong Duterte sa Libingan ng mga Bayani (a public wake for President Marcos before he is buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani.”

This is but one of a series of events being organized by various groups in response to Duterte’s plan, which he justified by saying Marcos was a soldier during World War II.

Marcos died in exile in 1989, three years after the EDSA People Power Revolution that booted him out of Malacañang after 20 years in power. In 1993, then President Fidel Ramos allowed Marcos’s body to be flown to the Marcoses’ bailiwick, Ilocos Norte.

One of the speakers at “Ang Bangkay ni Duterte” was former UP professor Helen Mendoza. She quoted heavily from an investigative report by The Guardian’s Nick Davies, published in May, titled “The $10bn question: what happened to the Marcos millions?”

What the Marcoses brought to Hawaii

Davies read reports by the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG), an agency created to recover the billions stolen by Marcos; interviewed officials; and looked at Customs records detailing what the Marcoses carried with them to Hawaii after the administration was overthrown.

Their close allies, the United States, flew them on two C-141 planes, with US Customs records detailing 23 pages’ worth of possessions which they brought with them.

“(T)hey had packed: 23 wooden crates; 12 suitcases and bags, and various boxes, whose contents included enough clothes to fill 67 racks; 413 pieces of jewelry, including 70 pairs of jewel-studded cufflinks; an ivory statue of the infant Jesus with a silver mantle and a diamond necklace; 24 gold bricks, inscribed “To my husband on our 24th anniversary”; and more than 27m Philippine pesos in freshly-printed notes. The total value was $15m,” Davies wrote.

“Why did the US rescue a man like Marcos who defrauded the people?” Mendoza asked. “Well, my friends, in foreign relationships, there are no permanent friends, but only permanent interests.”

Davies accused US Presidents, particularly Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, of keeping mum while Marcos ran the country and ruined its economy. This was because, Davies said, Marcos contributed to the campaigns of the two.

“When this surfaced in 1986, they said they had not known where the money came from,” Davies wrote.

The ties between Marcos and the US began in his early days as a politician. According to Davies’s research through the PCGG, the CIA helped “the bright young lawyer” win as congressman, and later, senator.

Three years into the presidency in 1968, according to Davies, the Marcos couple used false names to deposit $950,000 dollars in four accounts in Credit Suisse using false names: Ferdinand as “William Saunders” and Imelda as “Jane Ryan.”

For Irene Marcos’ wedding in 1983, “they built a new runway and hotel, renovated a 200-year-old church, demolished nearby houses and rebuilt them in traditional style, imported carriages from Austria and horses from Morocco,” Davies wrote.

Imelda jewelry

Meanwhile, auction houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s examined last year about 600 pieces of jewelry which were seized after Marcos was ousted.

Davies noted that a single piece of Imelda’s jewelry could pay for 2,000 Filipinos to go to college.

The PCGG was also still sequestering almost 200 pieces of valuable artworks from the Marcoses.

The late Jovito Salonga, the former PCGG chairman, wrote in his book Presidential Plunder: The Quest for the Marcos Ill-Gotten Wealth, that as of January 14, 1987, “virtually all of the wealth claimed by Mrs. Marcos, allegedly amounting to around 500 billion pesos, had been sequestered during my one-year assignment, subject to final judicial determination of their ownership.”

(This P500 billion pesos is now equivalent to $10.8 billion, with the present dollar-peso exchange rate at $1 = P46.16 and P1 = $0.022. Meanwhile, the exchange rate in 1987 was $1 = P20.57, according to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas:)

Imelda herself admitted to their vast properties. She told The Philippine Daily Inquirer in 1998, “We practically own everything in the Philippines—from electricity, telecommunications, airline, banking, beer and tobacco, newspaper publishing, television stations, shipping, oil and mining, hotels and beach resorts, down to coconut milling, small farms, real estate and insurance.”

In addition, she also revealed in an interview with the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse in 1998 that more money had yet be discovered.

“There is more money that the government is not yet aware of, but for the time being, I can admit that there is only $800 million kept in various international banks,” she said.

Recently, the PCGG said that it was able to recover P170.4 billion (or $3.69 billion) in ill-gotten wealth from 1986 to 2015.

The PCGG said that this amount includes:

• Swiss accounts, as adjudicated by the US District Court of Hawaii, and by US courts including accounts from California Overseas Bank, Redwood Bank-California, Union Bank of Switzerland, among others;
• Coco levy funds;
• Sale of surrendered assets such as shares of stocks in SMC and PLDT, real properties, paintings, and even cattle;
• Amounts from compromise agreements with cronies and dummies;
• Recovered funds from Boards of corporations on excess directors’ fees, etc. such as Philcomsat, OWNI, PCIB, PLDT, SMC, etc.; and
• Cash dividends and income from sequestered corporations.

Marcoses stole from coconut farmers

Former Akbayan chairman Ricardo Reyes, also a speaker at the forum, recalled how the Marcoses stole from coconut farmers.

From 1973, 55-centavo-per-100-kilogram fees were collected from each coconut farmer, purportedly to be used to stabilize the domestic price of coconut-based consumer goods like cooking oil.

Back then, coconut farmers who opposed or questioned the collected levies for which they did not benefit were harassed, imprisoned, and killed. Meanwhile, Marcos and his cronies used this to enrich themselves.

“My family in Mindanao had a coconut plantation, and my father was oh, so angry when he had to turn over part of the money to Danding Cojuangco,” Mendoza narrated.

 




Source:   http://www.msn.com/en-ph/news/national/should-late-dictator-be-buried-as-hero-marcoses-lavish-lifestyle-and-ill-gotten-wealth-revisited/ar-AAhWROQ?li=BBr8Mkn