Legal end of the Marcos' wealth

Philippine Daily Inquirer, Asia News Network, Manila

The supreme Court on Tuesday ended a 12-year-long saga of delays in the government's efforts to recover the secret assets of the Marcos family with a final decision holding that 658 million dollars in Swiss bank deposits of the Marcoses were ill- gotten and belonged to the Republic of the Philippines.

The ruling rejected the Marcoses' petition seeking reconsideration of the Court's decision of July 15, 2003, forfeiting in favor of the government the US$658 million held in escrow at the Philippine National Bank.

With characteristic decisiveness, the Court, in a unanimous resolution, paved the way for the government takeover of the fund. The decision marked for the first time the application of the notion of accountability on the Marcos family for illegal wealth accumulation during the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship.

It took 17 years, since the fall of the Marcos dictatorship in 1986, before the government succeeded in laying claim to the Marcos wealth.

The resolution is the last in a chain of decisions of the Court that favor public interests against the claims of private interests, and these decisions include the 2001 landmark ruling which held that the coco levy funds were "public in character."

A year later, the Sandiganbayan anti-graft court, ending a 16- year-long legal battle with business tycoon Eduardo Cojuangco, a Marcos crony, decided that Cojuangco had illegally acquired United Coconut Planters Bank with coconut levy funds and forfeited his shareholdings in the bank in favor of the government.

The Court's resolution on the Marcos Swiss bank deposits affirms the role of the Court as giant killer in the legal battles between the state and entrenched private wealth over assets on which the government has laid a claim in behalf of larger public interests.

In the resolution, the Court delivered a strong blow against delaying tactics, which the Marcoses used to the fullest. The Court held that the "Republic has a right for speedy disposition of this case," adding that "the people... are entitled to favorable judgment, free from vexatious, capricious and oppressive delays, the salutary objective being to restore the ownership of the Swiss deposits to the rightful owner, the Republic of the Philippines, within the shortest possible time."

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo understood the decision to mean that the Court had decided that the Marcos wealth "is for the use of the farmers." The Court's resolution cleared the way for funneling the wealth to finance the land reform program. It rejected an injunction clamped on the Marcos funds by U.S. Judge Manuel Real who awarded in the 1990s $2 billion in damages from the Marcos estate to 9,539 victims of human rights abuses during the Marcos regime.

The Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG), the agency tasked with recovering ill-gotten wealth of the Marcoses and their cronies, read into the decision more than just the end of a protracted struggle to recover at least part of the Marcos wealth. The resolution not only attacked Real's freeze order, which blocked the use of the funds for the land reform program.

It meant, said the PCGG, "our people will recover more than just $683 million stolen from them. With this decision, our people will recover the dignity stolen from them by the Marcos dictatorship and its cronies... Filipinos can now cast off the embarrassment of letting 17 years go on without Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos ever being held to account for corruption."

The resolution places the Marcos Swiss deposits beyond the pale of compromise settlements, which the Marcos family had sought in addition to putting up a sustained legal fight to keep control of the funds. Coming amid the call of the President for "total reconciliation" with political adversaries, the Court's ruling in effect excludes the Marcos assets as a negotiable item in seeking reconciliation with the Marcoses. The ruling has put a taboo sign on the use of Marcos assets for political deals.