Danny Chan

Accounting and auditing violations on seized Marcos assets “continue to this day,” said the PCGG’s legal-affairs commissioner. A former Senate president is meanwhile urging President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to pursue “newly discovered evidence of huge fraud” committed by the Marcoses and a Swiss bank involving $400 million in alleged ill-gotten wealth.

Victoria Avena, legal-affairs commissioner for the Presidential Commission on Good Government, said the government watchdog is investigating alleged violations of government accounting, auditing and other regulations on the sequestered Marcos properties in Tacloban City, particularly the Santo Niño Shrine, the Nipa Hut Complex and the People’s Center and Library, which has been leased out as a trade-fair venue in recent years.

The Commission on Audit, which discovered the violations two years, will assign a special team to conduct a new audit on these properties, she said. “To determine the status of these assets, the commission will be continuing its inspection tour, to include other properties” in the Eastern Visayas region, Ms Avena added.

Jovito Salonga, a former Senate president, said $400 million was secretly transferred from Swiss Credit Bank in Zurich to a subsidiary, Limag AG, in neighboring Liechtenstein following the Marcoses’ 1986 flight into exile.

He noted that the transfer was done “in obvious” complicity with the Zurich prosecutors but did not elaborate.

Mr Salonga was the first chairman of the PCGG, created by then president Corazon Aquino in 1986 to recover billions illegally amassed by the Marcoses during the 20-year rule of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

Mr Salonga said the information about the transfer came from Marie-Gabrielle Kohler, a Canadian lawyer formerly of the Swiss accounting firm KPMG Zurich. Ms Kohler, according to Mr Salonga, revealed the money was transferred on March 23, 1986, a day before the Swiss Federal Council imposed a freeze on Marcos’s Swiss deposits.

“Ms Kohler worked for KPMG Zurich in 1996. She learned that 10 years before, bank officials had been tipped off that the Swiss Banking Commission, bowing to pressure, was about to freeze all suspected Marcos accounts in the country,” he added. Ms Kohler claimed that “in the dead of night” on March 23-24, 1986, lawyers for KPMG, then called Fides, moved the money from the Swiss bank to Limag.

“Kohler was fired as manager of KPMG Zurich in 1997, partly because Credit Suisse learned that she knew where the Marcos money was and the huge fraud it had carried out beginning March 23 in cahoots with Swiss government authorities, especially Swiss prosecutors,” he said.

Mr Salonga added the transfer was hidden from the Swiss Banking Commission and the Swiss Federal Council, which had publicly alerted all Swiss banks to “watch carefully for deposits or withdrawals of funds that could be linked to President Marcos, his trustees or agents”.

He said the Philippine government has “the right and the authority to summon and investigate the Marcoses whose enormous income and inheritance tax liabilities remain unpaid until up to now.”

Marcos was forced into exile in February 1986 by a massive protest that was triggered by a mutiny led by then defence minister Juan Ponce Enrile and then police chief Fidel Ramos.

Shortly after Marcos’s ouster, Marcos and wife Imelda were accused of keeping millions of dollars stashed in secret Swiss bank accounts, which they denied.

Prosecutors say the Marcoses alone stole an estimated $10 billion during their 20-year rule that was marred by massive corruption and rampant human-rights abuses, including killings of political dissidents.

Marcos died in Honolulu, Hawaii on Sept. 28, 1989. The Ramos administration in 1996 allowed his remains to be returned to the Philippines.

His body is still being kept in a refrigerated crypt in a mausoleum in his hometown of Batac, Ilocos Norte. Since then his wife has been urging a hero’s burial for her husband, which the government has refused because of stiff public opposition.

Among Marcos assets valuated by the London auction house of Sotheby’s in 1990 were 78 sequestered precious 18th-century and 19th-century religious icons that were part of the collection of Mrs. Marcos and also housed in the Santo Niño Shrine. These prices were said to have a “saleroom estimated value” of between $58,390 and $85,520 in 1990 dollars and are expected to exceed $100,000 in today’s market. Sotheby’s staff never got to see the icons but derived the values from photographs taken in Leyte.

Sotheby’s also inventoried Russian silver, jewelry, European ceramics, Chinese ceramics and pictures or paintings, placing their value at between $16,952,793 and $23,909,526 (1990 dollars).

Among the highest-priced icons in 1990 were the following:

. A 19th-century icon depicting Festivals, valued then at $1,500-$2,250;

. A 19th-century icon of the Ascension and Festivals, $1,500-$2,250;

. Another 19th-century icon depicting Festivals, $1,200-$1,800;

. A 19th-century silver-covered icon of the Virgin from a Deisis, $1,050-$1,350;

. A 19th-century icon of the Virgin and Four Saints with a silver cover, $1,200-$1,500;

. A 19th-century four-part icon, $1,200-$1,500;

. Three 19th-century icons of the Savior with a silver cover, $1,200-$1,500;

. An icon of the Savior with a silver cover $1,200-$1,500;

. An icon of the Tikhkin Virgin on a silver cover, $1,050-$1,500.

Copyright ©2003 Danny Chan. About The Author