Another $29m Marcos money recovered
After a decade-long court battle, Philippines has recovered the remaining US$29 million of the multimillion-dollar Swiss bank deposits stashed away by the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
The Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) said it had remitted this month to the treasury $29 million from two accounts in West Landesbank (WestLB) in Singapore, which have been frozen since 2003 due to competing claims from Philippine National Bank (PNB), the martial law class-suit claimants and the so-called Marcos foundations.
The WestLB Singapore accounts were part of the ill-gotten wealth that the late strongman kept in various Swiss bank accounts under dummy foundations. In 1997, the Swiss Federal Supreme Court ordered that these deposits be returned to the Philippine government.
With the $658 million the PCGG recovered in 2004, the money from the WestLB Singapore accounts brings to $687 million the total amount recovered from the Marcos Swiss accounts.
“This is the last from the [Marcos] Swiss accounts,” PCGG Chair Andres Bautista said at a news conference on Wednesday.
Authorities have already recovered more than $4 billion from an estimated $5 billion to $10 billion amassed by the Marcoses during the dictator’s 20-year rule, Bautista said. He said last month that the government was targeting at least 50 billion pesos ($1.1 billion) more.
“There is still a lot of work that can be done in respect to pursuing ill-gotten wealth,” he said on Wednesday. “We should not allow ill-gotten wealth, the taking of ill-gotten wealth, to go unpunished.”
Bautista said the government had filed more than 200 civil cases for recovery and forfeiture of ill-gotten assets, including real estate, amounting to about 30 billion pesos to 40 billion pesos ($667 million to $890 million) from the Marcos family, their cronies and associates.
The PCGG is also seeking more than 150 paintings of “prominent masters and artists” collected by the Marcos family that went missing after the Marcoses were forced to flee from the presidential palace during the 1986 Edsa People Power Revolution.
Bautista declined to comment when asked whether he believed that Marcos’s widow, Imelda, and their three children were still living off their hidden wealth.
Imelda is a member of the House of Representatives. Her eldest child, Imee, is governor of Ilocos Norte province, while her son, Ferdinand Jr, is a senator. Her other daughter, Irene, has kept away from politics.
