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Tomorrow the Philippines is having an election, I wish that everyone is going to be safe, and will vote wisely.
Just wanted to share an article I read a while ago. I hope this will make people think many times before putting back another Marcos. Learn from history!
Vote wisely or deja vu!
“On a bright February morning in 1986, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos fled into exile. After 21 years as president of the Philippines, Marcos’ luck in the Philippines had run out. The army had turned against him, and the people had gone out onto the streets in droves. The Marcoses had seen this crisis coming, and had been able to prepare their escape accordingly. When they landed that morning at the Hickham USAF base in Hawaii, they carried possessions aplenty.
Ferdinand Marcos, former Philippine president, and his family. (Photo credit: flickr.com)
The official US customs record takes
up around 23 pages. In the two C-141 transport planes that took them
away, they had packed: 23 wooden crates; 12 suitcases and bags, and
various boxes, the contents of which included enough clothing to fill
67 racks; 413 pieces of jewelery, including 70 pairs of jewel-studded
cufflinks; an ivory statue of the infant Jesus, adornedwith a silver
mantle and a diamond necklace; 24 gold bricks, inscribed “To my
husband on our 24th anniversary”; and more than 27 million
Philippine pesos in freshly-printed notes.
The total value was $15 million.
By anybody’s standards, this amount
was a fortune, and the late President Marcos’ official salary had
never risen above $13,500 a year, so it was painstakingly clear that
this was a ridiculous amount of stolen wealth. However, the new
government of the Philippines knew this was only a very small part of
the Marcoses’ wealth. The shocking reality was that Ferdinand
Marcos had accrued a fortune nearly 650 times greater. According to
an estimate by the Philippine supreme court, he had accumulated up to
$10bn while in office.
Some of his closest allies also stole
billions. Seeing as their victim was an entire nation wherein 40% of
the people survive on less than $2 a day, the Republic of the
Philippines decided to try to retrieve the money as soon as possible.
The very first executive order issued
by the new president, Cory Aquino, established the Presidential
Commission on Good Government, or the PCGG. Its goal was to recover
“all ill-gotten wealth accumulated by former president Ferdinand
Marcos, his immediate family, relatives, subordinates and close
associates” and given the power to seize any assets believed to be
the proceeds of crime.
Thirty years later, the PCGG is still
at work, with around 94 lawyers, researchers and administrators house
in a building recovered from the Marcos family. The government
provides an annual budget of $2.2 million. Their staff has traced
money all over the world and fought their way through hundreds of
court cases.
Sadly, the PCGG has recovered only a
fraction of what was taken by the Marcoses and their networks. No-one
has served any prison sentence for their part in the crime.
Today, its task still far from
complete. To make matters worse, its longevity is threatened by a
political development that the crowds who swelled the streets in
triumph as Marcos fled would never have expected to happen: The late
president’s son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, otherwise known as
“Bongbong,” is a frontrunner in the vice-presidential national
elections this May 9.
If he makes it, he would have the
power to shut down the PCGG, as political allies of his family
The PCGG has assembled a tremendous
archive in its years of global detective work. It has the president’s
handwritten diary, a notepaper headed “From the office of the
president,” with scribbled sums continuously adding up his cash;
minutes of company meetings with his personal comments written in the
margins; “side agreements”; contracts; records of multiple bank
accounts; hundreds of share certificates; private investigators’
reports; and thousands upon thousands of pages of court judgments.
The PCGG archive paints a crystal
clear picture of the story of the biggest theft in history, and of
the master criminal who was behind it all. It also opens up a new
perspective into the offshore world revealed by the Panama Papers.
Marcos was one of the first to exploit the secret jurisdictions and
hidden ownership, still in the early stages of being built away from
the eyes of the public.
The story starts here.
Once upon a time, a young civil
servant named Chito Roque worked his way through the crowds outside
the presidential palace to the gates. He was with his boss, a senior
official in the new government, and they eventually found their way
into the Marcoses’ private living quarters. There, they saw the
signs of a hasty flight: food still warm on the dining table, empty
boces, papers scattered all over the floor, shredding machines
stuffed with more paper.
His boss left early, but Chito
wandered into the bedroom. Once inside, “I saw a filing cabinet and
I opened the first drawer and I saw a safe inside and there were
numbers, a combination that was pasted on the door, so I followed the
combination and opened the safe.”
Inside, he found records of bank
accounts in Switzerland and Canada, share certificates and several
letters signed by Marcos.
Those documents are now in the offices
of the PCGG, along with thousands more that were retrieved from the
palace and the 50 or so other properties the Marcoses and their
allies owned in the Philippines, and from homes and offices in the
US. As the years have passed, hundreds of thousands of pages have
been added from several other sources. All of them are now neatly
ordered and filed in a white, two-storey building near the centre of
Manila.
The PCGG documents suggest that
Marcos, like most criminals, started out small. After becoming
President in 1965, his income from kickbacks for government contracts
increased, but his shady misdeeds went no further than stashing
$215,000 in a New York bank in his own name.
The records show that he and Imelda
took their first steps to real secrecy on March 20, 1968, when they
used false names to deposit $950,000 in four accounts with Credit
Suisse. He went under the name William Saunders (he practised his new
signature on the headed paper), and Imedla went under Jane Ryan.
By February 1970, the Swiss accounts
were so loaded, the couple added an extra layer of concealment by
transferring their ownership to foundations registered in
Liectenstein.
Then Marcos decided to up his ante.
September 21, 1972. The date he
declared martial law. As his diary records go, the Nixon
administration consented to him shutting down congress, arresting his
political opponents, taking control of the media and courts, and
suspending all civil rights. On the same day, he took time off to
open another Swiss bank account.
A week later, while reflecting on his
“reforms”, Marcos wrote: “The legitimate use of force on chosen
targets is the incontestable secret of the reform movement.”
In the next nine years, an estimated
34,000 trade unionists, student leaders, writers and politicians were
tortured with electric shocks, heated irons and rape; 3,240 men and
women were dumped dead in public places; 398 others simply
disappeared. With an iron grip over all politics, the president
closed in on the country’s wealth.
Now Marcos started to steal whole
companies.
He wanted the nation’s electricity
company, Meralco. It was owned by Eugenio Lopez, patriarch of one of
the families who had run the country for centuries. Marcos had
Lopez’s son charged with plotting to assassinate him, a crime which
carried the death penalty. The old oligarch handed over his $400
milllion dollar company for $220.
For the most part, Marcos’ takeovers
involved no violence. Martial law literally allowed him to write
his own laws.
When he wanted to take over the sugar
industry, he started off with setting up companies and issuing
decrees that allowed them to dominate the planting, milling and
international marketing of Philippine sugar, which accounted for 27%
of export earnings.
Next, he created a Philippine Exchange
Company, decreed that it should handle all foreign sugar sales and
used its monopoly position to buy from farmers at rock-bottom prices
and sell at vast profit. This allowed him to buy Northern Lines,
which had the contract to shop the sugar overseas.
Finally, he decreed that the sugar
industry be exempt from minimum-wage law, with the result that
500,000 labourers saw their income fall to less than $1 a day, making
even more profit.
In the same way, Marcos used his own
companies to take over three other key areas of agriculture:
coconuts, tobacco and bananas. He craftily edged his way into
dominating industries across the whole economy by granting himself
government contracts, monopoly deals and tax exemptions – logging
and paper, meat, oil, insurance, shipping and airlines, beer and
cigarettes, textiles, hotels and casinos, newspapers, radio and TV.
Predatory. Privatisation at its worst.
He analyzed his crime through a
lawyer’s eyes. He noted that while people would obviously observe
that the Marcoses were suddenly very wealthy, what mattered was that
there would be no evidence.
He set up his companies so that
externally, they belonged to other people. Marcos deployed dozens of
his cronies: relatives, golf partners, political allies, anybody who
shared his greed. The crony would sign a deed transferring ownership
of most of the business – usually 60% – but would leave a blank
space for the name. Marcos would hold the deed and leave the space
blank. Technically, there was no “evidence” that he owned the
60%.
When the Japanese paid reparations for
the second world war, he skimmed it and stowed the profit into his
Swiss accounts. He stole international aid money, gold from the
Central Bank, loans from international banks and military aid from
the US. He decreed that more than a million impoverished coconut
farmers must pay a levy, to “improve the industry”, amounting to
$216m. He had already issued decrees to gift most of the coconut
trade to one of his own companies; now he stole great blocks of the
levy fund, while simuiltaneously receiving kickbacks on government
contracts.
Eventually, all this theft created a
logistical problem: how to handle the huge flow of money. The PCGG
archive chronicles how Marcos set up his own banking system, by using
cronies to buy private banks and others to control the state banks.
They were useful for stealing more money, in loans that would never
be repaid, and for obtaining foreign currency – although eventually
he set up his own specialist bank to trade currency on the black
market.
Most importantly, the banks helped
regulate the mass flow of his income. Bank staff would make regular –
sometimes weekly – trips to the palace, taking away cheques and
bundles of cash, which were then deposited in his accounts. The
millions were then funnelled into Marcos’s expanding stockpile of
offshore accounts (in Switzerland alone, he had 69). Anywhere in the
world, he and Imelda could reach out for their cash – cash that had
been wiped clean of its connection to crime.
Multiple houses were provided for the
extended family, and they also had a $5.5m yacht, private planes,
helicopters and dozens of Mercedes-Benzes. In June 1983, when their
youngest daughter wed, they built a new runway and hotel, refurbished
a 200-year-old church, demolished nearby houses and rebuilt them in
traditional style and imported carriages from Austria and horses from
Morocco.
The men and women who work at the PCGG
are fueled by their anger. Everyday they discover more details of the
family’s crimes, while its victims sleep on the pavements and in
the slums around them. They are well aware of everything the money
could do for the people of the Philippines; if Marcos stole $10bn, it
could have paid for the entire government budget for his last year in
power three times over.”
Why
are so many Filipinos suffering from short term memory loss? Never
mind the things that Marcos’ built, Adolf Hitler built lots too!
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