Pinoy Daily News

The paintings were recovered Tuesday from Marcos' old residence in San Juan city in metropolitan Manila, said the head of the agency tasked to recover wealth amassed by Marcos during his 20-year rule.

Andres Bautista, chairman of the Presidential Commission on Good Government, said court sheriffs also tried to seize paintings from a condominium belonging to Marcos' widow, Imelda. He said the sheriffs were kept waiting outside for an hour, and when they entered they saw her crying and found only empty walls and hooks that once held paintings.

Bautista said sheriffs and National Bureau of Investigation agents also went to Imelda Marcos' congressional office and to the Marcos family's ancestral home in northern Ilocos Norte province. He said he is awaiting their reports.

The commission obtained a court order this week imposing a "writ of attachment" on the 156 paintings in connection with a civil suit seeking to recover the Marcos wealth, which has been estimated to be in the billions of dollars.

Bautista said the seizure of the paintings was necessary before they "disappear or are hidden away." The recovered items were taken to the central bank for safekeeping.

He said his agency will seek help from international auction houses Sotheby's and Christie's to determine the paintings' authenticity.

Bautista said the civil trial will continue until the court decides who should own the paintings.

"The position of the government is this is part of ill-gotten wealth and should be returned to the government and the people," he said, citing a Supreme Court decision. The 2003 ruling said the Marcoses' wealth in excess of their total legal income of around $304,000 from 1965 to 1986 was presumed to be ill-gotten.

Marcos died in exile in Hawaii in 1989 without admitting any wrongdoing during his presidency.

Bautista said earlier this year that Philippine authorities have recovered more than $4 billion of an estimated $5 billion to $10 billion amassed by the Marcoses. That includes $712 million from Marcos' secret Swiss bank accounts, he said.


READ MORE @ LEDGER-INQUIRER.COM

The Marcoses never really left home

by Raissa Robles

When the Marcoses fled Malacañang in 1986, many Filipinos heaved a sigh of relief, thinking they were gone for good.

Now 28 years later, the Marcoses are parked at the very doorstep of Malacañang, with the dictator Ferdinand Marcos’ only son and namesake being groomed to retake the Palace come 2016.
Ferdinand Jr. (Bongbong) is a senator eyeing the presidency; his sister Imelda Jr. (Imee) is governor of their northern stronghold; their mother Imelda is a congresswoman; and their late dictator-dad turned into a saintly-looking icon like the dead Pope that is miraculously preserved inside St. Peter’s Cathedral in the Vatican.
Religious cults like the Alpha-Omega have sprung to await Marcos’ resurrection. As cult member Teresita Maglahus said in 1993: “We are waiting for a miracle in the Philippines, the new Jerusalem. It will be revealed to our countrymen and other nations that … President Marcos is God.”
How do you account for such a stunning reversal from ill fortune?
Simple.

They never really left.

Political roots intact
The 1986 People Power Revolution did chop down the Marcos political tree. But its intricate roots that spread far and wide across the state bureaucracy and Philippine society remained intact. All the Marcoses had to do was nurture the roots and wait for the tree to grow back.
In 1998, by Imee Marcos’ own reckoning, “we waited 12 years to be on the right side of the fence.” Right side meant a political alliance with then victorious President-elect Joseph Estrada, velvet seats in Congress for Imee and her mother, and a governorship for Bongbong.
An ecstatic Imee spilled the family’s secret to success: “Many professionals were appointed by my father. So you have this immense bedrock of Marcos appointees who keep moving up.”
Like secret stay-behind units, this vast army of professionals scattered in all sectors of society have defended the Marcoses and helped erase the dark legacy of their regime.
For various reasons, no post-Marcos administration made it a point to keep the memory of the atrocities and the greed alive and pass this on to the next generation. I remember early on then President Corazon Aquino’s board of censors chief Manoling Morato scolding the public and the media for discussing the Marcos excesses. “Let’s stop demonizing the Marcoses,” he said, after the dictator died in 1989.

Morato was probably following the age-old Filipino practice of not speaking ill of the dead.
I have been a Marcos watcher since 1981 when I unwittingly witnessed the paper “lifting” of martial law in Malacañang. This was courtesy of an invite from Ferdinand Marcos’ speechwriter Adrian Cristobal who had taken over the Philippine Education Company which published The Review magazine. I was its associate editor.
I did not know it then but that was part of my political awakening—to see up close the pomp and power of the dictatorship. Imelda Marcos delayed the speech but no one minded. When she entered Heroes’ Hall, the center parted like the Red Sea as she walked regally, towering above all, heavily made up and in a terno that made her look like a character in a play. She knew how to stage drama.
Later, I would cover her as the governor of Metro Manila Commission, then as congresswoman and an accused.

Looking back, I can see the various factors that helped the Marcoses stage their comeback.
First of all, few in the political opposition that replaced Ferdinand Marcos knew how to run a government. President Corazon Aquino had to rely heavily on the bureaucracy that Marcos had built up to institutionalize his tyranny. Enough key civil servants remained closet Marcos loyalists or were sympathetic or deeply grateful to the Marcos couple for acts of favor.
President Cory tried to “deMarcosify” the bureaucracy through a purge but the Senate pressured her to suspend this twice, according to Dr. Ledivina Cariño, a University of the Philippines College of Public Administration professor in her 1992 book, “Bureaucracy for Democracy: the Dynamics of Executive-Bureaucracy Interaction during Governmental Transitions.”

This is probably what enabled Mrs. Marcos to beat her corruption conviction.
In 1991, President Cory’s government was faced with a difficult dilemma. The Swiss Federal Court had given an ultimatum: If Manila did not take Mrs. Marcos to court by December 20, 1991, the freeze on all the Marcoses’ Swiss bank assets, including the already identified US$356 million, would be lifted. That meant the Marcoses could claim them all.
This was why Imelda Marcos was finally allowed to come home.
Former Senator Aquilino Pimentel Jr.—Mrs. Aquino’s second Interior and Local Governments Minister—told me the second factor that allowed Mrs. Marcos to manipulate the situation. The Aquino government stopped itself from implementing deeply needed reforms that could have rooted out the dictatorship because “we wanted to be the opposite of Marcos.”

When Marcos imposed Martial Law, he jailed his political enemies. When Imelda Marcos returned home on November 4, 1991, she was allowed to stage a dramatic homecoming.
Writing about that moment in “The Aquino Administration–Record & Legacy” published by the University of the Philippines Press in 1992, Mrs. Aquino’s executive secretary, Franklin Drilon (now the Senate President), said: “Mrs. Marcos was allowed to return with no restriction to the pomp and pageantry which accompanied it. Her personal security was ensured, and she was allowed to participate in the election.”

Goofy sound bites

Imelda’s return probably marks the start of the family’s slow but steady climb back to power. Reporters, both foreign and local, simply adored her because she gave such goofy sound bites.
By September 1995, as the Church and militant groups prepared to mount nationwide protests against the 27th anniversary of martial law, Mrs. Marcos defiantly said: “The martial law declaration on Sept. 21, 1972, was one of the best things that happened in Philippine history … to ensure peace for our country.”
Few recalled that this was the same woman who got a convicted murderer to win the presidency in 1965 by serenading voters and telling them—would someone as beautiful as I marry a murderer?
Off-camera, she tirelessly nurtured the network that she and her husband had built up over two decades of being in power. That network gave her the edge when she fought off hundreds of lawsuits and she was convicted on Sept. 24, 1993, for approving an “anomalous transaction” that caused the Light Rail Transit Authority, which she chaired, to lose the equivalent of US$4.8 million. The LRTA vice chair Jose Dans was also convicted for signing the contract on behalf of LRTA.
Convicted but never jailed

This transaction involved leasing out two train station terminals at below market rates to a private foundation that she herself put up and headed. Philippine General Hospital Foundation was supposed to raise funds for the state-owned Philippine General Hospital but its hospital director told me then in an interview that PGH never got a cent from PGH Foundation. Mrs. Marcos signed the contract with LRTA on behalf of the foundation even though she was also the LRTA chair.
In 1996, the Supreme Court found Mrs. Marcos “guilty beyond reasonable doubt,” sentenced her to 12 years in jail and fined her the equivalent of the anomalous contract. Dans was acquitted because the Court found “no conspiracy” between him and Mrs. Marcos.

Around the same time that the government of Fidel Ramos—the dictator’s second cousin—was prosecuting Mrs. Marcos in court, it was secretly negotiating a deal that only came to light in 1996 when former Solicitor General Frank Chavez asked the Supreme Court to stop it. The deal would have allowed the Marcoses to walk off with 25 percent of all their ill-gotten wealth—here and abroad. Tax-free. In addition, all pending criminal and civil cases against them would be dropped.
But that wasn’t all. Chavez presented a letter dated Jan. 24, 1995, from Mrs. Marcos’ lawyer to Presidential Commission on Good Government chair Magtanggol Gunigundo saying “it is further understood that $50 million will be taken from the top as approved by President Ramos and your
(Gunigundo’s) good self.”

“Where will the $50 million taken from the top go?” Chavez demanded to know as he asked to court to permanently bar all compromise deals with the Marcoses.
Just think. If the late lawyer Chavez had not won this case, the Marcoses would have walked off with at least US$89 million, or P3.9 billion (at P44 per dollar). That would have been their cut in the US$356 million loot the dictator and his wife stashed in Swiss banks—not for the Filipino people but for their three children. I have copies of Swiss documents to show this.
In addition, the government would never have known about the US$40 million Arelma account that the court recently awarded “with finality” to the government as part of the Marcoses’ ill-gotten wealth.

Senator Bongbong Marcos told me during a foreign correspondents forum in 2011 that he was still after striking a deal: “We’ve been pursuing a compromise settlement since 1986. We will continue to do so.”

You can just imagine what he will do with the rest of his family’s cases if he became President.
Part of the Marcos propaganda being propagated on the Internet is that no Marcos has ever gone to jail for any crime. Therefore all the crimes alleged against them are untrue.
Mrs. Marcos was acquitted in 1990 over the antiracketeering case in New York for four reasons. First, Mr. Marcos who was the principal accused was never arraigned because he said he was “too ill” to stand trial.

Second, the Swiss bank documents that would have traced the money trail for the purchase of New York properties from Manila to Hong Kong to Switzerland to New York never came. Her lawyers had successfully blocked their release. Third, Mrs. Marcos’ lawyer Gerry Spence used the “I’m just a housewife” defense while the former First Lady put on an act before the jury. And fourth, the jurors felt Mrs. Marcos should be standing trial in Manila, not in New York.

If Twitter and Facebook had existed then, her trial would have had a different outcome.
Now let me go back to the LRTA case for which Mrs. Marcos was actually convicted. This illustrates how she has managed to escape convictions all these years.

Five years after her conviction by the Sandiganbayan over the LRTA anomaly, Ramos’ Solicitor General Romeo de la Cruz suddenly submitted a highly unusual request before the Supreme Court to reverse Mrs. Marcos’ conviction for lack of evidence.
I was greatly puzzled and shocked by seeing the chief government lawyer throw away a landmark case that the government had been trying to win all those years.
And so, I interviewed SolGen De la Cruz on the matter. He told me then: “Sandiganbayan erred. It should not have convicted Mrs. Marcos. It played blind to the evidence she presented. So we recommended to the Supreme Court…to acquit Mrs. Marcos.”

He also told me that he arrived at this on “purely legal grounds” and “without asking clearance form higher officials including President Ramos.”

This was even though his office was under the Office of the President and it was never involved in prosecuting the case before Sandiganbayan. The Office of the Ombudsman provided the prosecution lawyers.
I asked him how he got involved and he said it was because the Supreme Court had directed the SolGen, not the Ombudsman, to comment on Mrs. Marcos’ appeal for acquittal.
One of the boys

I asked him about his background and I learned that SolGen De la Cruz became a government lawyer in 1974 serving under Solicitor General Estelito Mendoza—Mrs. Marcos’ lead lawyer. De la Cruz slowly rose through the ranks before being appointed chief government lawyer by Ramos in February 1998—a nearly midnight appointment.

A disgusted human rights lawyer Rene Saguisag told me at that time, “Solicitor General Romeo de la Cruz’s flip-flop is a reflection of the new power situation. If, as we understand it, he is one of the boys of former Solicitor General and Justice Minister Estelito Mendoza, the snicker or wink factor will be there. That passes for administration of justice in our benighted country.”

The Supreme Court used Solgen De la Cruz’ stunning request for acquittal as one of the grounds to acquit Mrs. Marcos on Oct. 6, 1998, by a vote of 8-5-1.
“Thank you, Lord,” Mrs. Marcos said.

But former Senator Jovito Salonga had a different take on the verdict. He noted that five upheld Mrs. Marcos’ conviction: Chief Justice Andrews Narvasa, Justices Artemio Panganiban, Florenz Regaldao, Flerida Ruth Romero and Hilario Davide Jr.
Gerry Spence

But Salonga noted that seven of the eight justices who cleared Mrs. Marcos owed their appointments to senior judicial positions to Mr. Marcos or to Estelito Mendoza, her lead counsel.
I tried checking out Salonga’s statement and this is what I found. Four of the eight justices who had acquitted Mrs. Marcos once had her lawyer Estelito Mendoza as their boss.
Reynato Puno (now a retired Chief Justice) worked under Mendoza for nine years. Vicente Mendoza was Assistant SolGen under Mendoza from 1973 to 1980. Santiago Kapunan worked under Mendoza from 1972 to 1973. Fidel Purisima did not work under the SolGen but Mr Marcos appointed him a judge.

The two others who acquitted Mrs. Marcos were Antonio Martinez and Leonardo Quisumbing. I could not find any reference to Martinez but I personally knew Quisumbing who once worked at the Defense Department under Ramos. Jose Vitug abstained from voting.
If this was a jury in the United States, at the very least some of them could have been questioned for possible conflict of interest.

To this day, the Supreme Court is silent about its dark history during the dictatorship. When Renato Corona was Chief Justice, the court website just skipped any reference to the fact that it was the Supreme Court that legitimized the Marcos dictatorship. Today, if you click the icon that says “history,” nothing comes out.

Is the Supreme Court ashamed of its history? Or is it still being rewritten?
As my fellow journalist husband Alan wrote, “It is a truism that Filipinos are a forgiving people. But how will they ever forgive the crimes of the Marcoses? They cannot even seem to remember them.”


READ MORE @ INQUIRER.NET

Ronald Ian Laing (pronounced Lane) was born in Manila on June 19, 1915. He was detained with his mother, Mercedes, a Spanish citizen, and brother Eric at the Sto. Tomas Interment Camp during World War II.   Listed as a British POW, Laing went to San Francisco after Liberation and was mentored by Eddie Cavagnero, florist to Hollywood stars, who eventually became his long-time partner.



When he returned to Manila in 1957, Laing set up his famous Ronnie’s Flower Shop on A. Mabini in Ermita in 1957. By the late ’60s, he had become the style dictator of the city’s American ladies and Manila’s elite. All parties, weddings and home interiors had to be done by him. Corsages and gentlemen’s lapel carnations had to be ordered from Ronnie’s, including funeral wreaths, with his trademark of imported gold stickers spelling out the name of the deceased.
For his services to the former First Lady, then President Marcos granted Ronald Ian Laing Filipino citizenship on June 11, 1978.
Manila’s style maven shared a home with Cavagnero on Mango Avenue, Sta. Mesa, Manila. The house was built on a sprawling lot with apartments built at the back for Laing’s employees. It was in his home where he hosted intimate but casual dinners for his closest friends.  On these occasions, he would buy plain white plates and have them sent to Hong Kong to be hand-painted with designs that matched the tablecloth or the theme of his party. None of the preparations was ostentatious; everything was done in understated elegance. Before they became fashionable, sinamay, driftwood, bamboo, ginger flowers, large gabi leaves and other local materials found their way into Laing’s designs.


His parties were never catered; all the dishes were prepared in his kitchen.  Imelda Marcos and her Blue Ladies attended Laing’s bigger parties and so did the creme de la creme of Manila.



READ MORE @ INQUIRER.NET

Administration ally Senator Francis ‘Chiz’ Escudero said on Monday that the late President Ferdinand Marcos should be allowed to be buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani, adding that “now is the time to heal the wounds of the past.”

Escudero put forward his suggestion despite presidential spokesperson Edwin Lacierda’s statement that President Benigno Aquino has not wavered on his stand not to allow Marcos’ burial at the Libingan Ng Mga Bayani during his term since this would be the ‘height of injustice’ to the former strongman’s Martial Law victims.

Lacierda said the issue of Marcos’ burial had never been discussed by the president and his officials.

In 2001, however, Aquino asked Binay to study and review the matter due to a mounting clamor at that time.

Binay had suggested a hero’s state burial with  military honors in his hometown in Ilocos, but this was also rejected by the president.

Escudero said, however, that it was his personal belief that it is time to put an end to all open wounds in our history so the nation can move forward faster.


READ MORE @ MANILASTANDARD

READ MORE @ http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/379655/news/nation/miriam-bongbong-in-dbm-s-new-list-of-dap-recipients

After the Aug. 21, 1971 Plaza Miranda bombing, President Ferdinand Marcos suspended the writ of habeas corpus. Proclamation No. 889, which allowed the police to make arrests without warrants and to detain the arrested without charges, took effect immediately but was announced to the public only after a few days. It seems clear now that the tactic was a dress rehearsal for the full-scale imposition of martial law the following year.


Marcos, entering the second half of his second and last term, was anxious about how the Supreme Court would rule on the constitutionality of the suspension of the writ, which had been immediately challenged. So he did what came naturally to him: He subverted yet another democratic institution.
Soon after hearings on the case started, he invited his first appointee to the Supreme Court, Associate Justice Fred Ruiz Castro, for a consultation. The following extended passage from “Diary of a Dictator” by the journalist William Rempel (whose name I had mistakenly pluralized—Rempels—in an earlier column) makes for disturbing reading.


“On Tuesday night, September 16, 1971, Justice Castro was a special guest at the presidential palace for a private session that reeked of legal and ethical conflicts. Over a late evening dinner, the judge described how the case was playing to his colleagues on the bench. He handicapped the current leanings and likely votes of each justice. It was the judge’s first act as a spy for the Marcos legal team.


“The president, in turn, lobbied the jurist. Spared any cross examination or challenges to accuracy, Marcos made arguments and shared classified documents supporting his widely disputed claims of a Communist insurgency and the purely specious allegations that Senator [Ninoy] Aquino was in league with the New People’s Army.
“The mere fact that the jurist met secretly with one side violated a raft of legal principles from basic rules of fairness and due process to the separation of powers. And Justice Castro offered Marcos what sounded to the president like a magic trick. If Marcos immediately lifted the suspension in some regions of the country, Castro believed that he could persuade the court to uphold the president’s previous proclamation unanimously.



Read more @ INQUIRER.NET