Saturday, June 16, 2007 Ong: Twice over by unfreezing the ill-gotten wealth By Ted Aldwin Ong Misreadings
THE Marcoses are having a time of their lives after the Quezon City Regional Trial Court (RTC) acquitted Imelda Marcos of five counts of tax code violations. The Court judge underscored that the prosecution have failed to establish the criminal intent in all the complaints.
This is not the first time that the government failed to pin down the Marcoses. The Bureau of Internal Revenue filed five counts of tax code violations against Imelda Marcos on grounds that the widow of the late dictator failed to remit income tax amounting to P33, 737 of its P192,080 earnings in 1985.
The amount that the BIR is going after can be naïvely described as dirt in the toenail of the Marcoses. This is beyond comparison considering the millions of dollars that the Marcoses has stashed in secret Swiss accounts dubbed as ill-gotten wealth.
Until today the Philippine government has been engaging the Swiss Courts for the return of Marcos' ill-gotten wealth on the fold of the government. I was caught in awe of the complexities and intricacies that former senate president Jovito Salonga, the first Chair of the Presidential Commission on Good Government, have to go through in running after these accounts of the Marcoses.
However, the Imelda Marcos acquittal is not only reason why the Marcoses are celebrating. Recently, reports have been out that the Swiss court "unfreezed" the $4-million Swiss deposit of Herminio Desini – a known Marcos crony believed to be the "front" of the late strongman and the person instrumental in the hiding of Marcos' ill-gotten wealth.
Just a quick recap in order to refresh the memory of the many Filipinos who are unfamiliar of the Desini's, Herminio Desini is no ordinary crony or golfing partner of Ferdinand Marcos. He is husband to a first cousin of Imelda Marcos.
Twenty-nine years ago, reports have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post pointing to Herminio Desini as the person who received $4 - $35 million from Westinghouse as his "commission" for helping the U.S. firm obtain the contract for the Philippine Nuclear Power Plant.
Before a U.S. court, no less than the Westinghouse admitted of giving $17.3 million in cash to Desini through his network of companies with whom Ferdinand Marcos stands as co-owner. This is admitted by Jesus Desini himself, a cousin and lawyer of Herminio Desini in the same U.S. court in 1988.
Just last week, information came out that the "Desini account was unfrozen by the Swiss Federal Court after the Philippine government failed to prosecute its claim on the money with finality."
This decision did not come without a warning. In August last year, the Swiss court had warned the Philippine government that a resolution was reached by the Swiss Federal Court directing the release of the frozen deposit if the government failed to come up with a final decision on its ownership of the Desini account by the end of 2006.
The failure to establish its claim on the account rests in the shoulder of the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG). Is two decades not enough for our government to establish its claim on these deposits?
Our government officials heading the institutions tasked to reclaim the money robbed by the late dictator might have entered into some unscrupulous transaction with the Marcoses resulting into the unfreezing of the Desini account. How could one not doubt when the current PCGG chair has been spotted doing a cha-cha with Imelda Marcos in one occasion? If the PCGG seem to be mindless of the underpinning moral responsibility required of their work, then there is no reason for a PCGG to exist.
If this is so then it robbed what has been robbed from the Filipino people a billion times over. Now, who stands to lose on the failure of the current PCGG leadership to reclaim the ill-gotten wealth? Not the government but the Filipino people. What it wasted? Not the 21-years of running after it but the 1986 people's revolt against the dictatorship, and not only that, the struggles that preceded it. (Comments to tao.ssi@gmail.com)
