11/03/2024
Ed Lingao
ABC NEWS AUSTRALIA GRILLS BBM ON ILL-GOTTEN WEALTH
Around 14 minutes into the one-on-one interview, the Australian correspondent pops a question that many Filipino journalists, quite unfortunately, have never even bothered to ask the Marcoses - the plunder of the country's wealth during the first Marcos era.
At first BBM laughs nervously, to which the correspondent asks why he was laughing at a question about plunder.
The President then goes into an array of half-truths and non-sequiturs by saying that the assertions against his family had all been shown to be untrue. This, despite several court rulings (with finality) that had ordered the return of billions of pesos in ill-gotten wealth, and the billions of pesos in compromise deals struck by Marcos cronies for the surrender of the assets that they had held for the Marcos family.
When confronted with the fact that the past SIX administrations had already recovered some $5 billion in assets from the Marcoses and their cronies, the President says that his family had signed quitclaims, telling the government that they could keep any money that they find.
Unfortunately, that was not exactly true. From 1986 until 2003, the Marcos family, including Imelda Marcos and BongBong himself, fought the Philippine government for control of more than $350 million in secret Swiss bank accounts. At one point, BBM even testified in court about the accounts. His mother, at one point too, practically dismissed her children's claims to the Swiss accounts, saying most of money, around 90%, actually belonged to her.
In the end, the Philippine Supreme Court ruled with finality to forfeit the Swiss accounts (by then worth more than $600 million because of interest) in favor of the Philippine treasury. Read GR152154. It took 17 years to retrieve the money because the Marcoses fought tooth and nail for it.
When the President told the correspondent that his family had everything taken from it, the correspondent pointed out that this was not the view of the PCGG, which claims there are still around $6 billion to be recovered from the family. To this, BBM says that "true investigations" have shown this to be untrue, and that the view of the Filipino people about the Marcos family has already changed. Proof of that was the fact that a Marcos was back in power. That all this time, they were just victims of propaganda.
To be fair, the Marcoses have won many of the cases, partly because of negligence, partly incompetence, partly corruption. But the Marcoses have lost several, which have already resulted in the recovery of billions. What's important here is not the number of acquittals; the court decisions ordering the return of money is what counts the most.
It is quite ironic that BBM complains of propaganda, when the deluge of false narratives and myth-remaking in the last decade was largely instrumental in reshaping the present opinion of the public. In the end, opinions and myths succeeded in trumping these facts:
1. That the asset declaration of Ferdinand Marcos Sr in December 1964 was just P 165,000.
2. That the combined legal earnings of FM and IMR from 1965 to 1985 amounted to P 2.3M. Yet their income tax filings declared a total income of P16M.
3. Yet the family laid claim to the $300m swiss bank accounts, among many other monies. In their court filings, the family never bothered to try to explain the source of these accounts, except to claim them as theirs.
4. Despite all these facts, Imelda at one point was one of the richest people in Congress, with declared assets of almost a billion pesos. At one point too, BBM's declared assets were P300-400 million.
5. In one interview with us, Imee tried to explain it all away by claiming that her father had been one of the highest paid lawyers after the war, that he was a brilliant lawyer sought by multinational companies.
Of course he was brilliant, no one disputes that. But I replied that the Supreme Court's 2003 ruling found that her father had never declared ANY significant income or paid any significant tax as a lawyer after a thorough search of all BIR records. In fact, the court noted that her father did not even seem to have a physical law office to begin with. And of course, the clincher was the father's asset declaration in 1965 of only P 165,000. Confronted with these findings, Imee said that she cannot talk about these cases because some of them were still pending in court. To which we replied that this particular case was decided with finality way back in 2003.
So yes, public opinion may change because of how well narratives are weaved and/or twisted. But the fact remains that billions have already been recovered from a family that claims never to have stolen a cent.
