Part Six
Salonga violated PCGG law
THE executive orders vesting the PCGG with vast powers without corresponding accountability and the designation of former Sen. Jovito Salonga as its first chairman led the PCGG to unlawful acts of omission and commission. Salonga, the legal luminary, has repeatedly ignored or violated the law as PCGG head.
For example, the Sandiganbayan on November 21, 1991, ordered the PCGG to release from sequestration 97 assets of the group of former Ambassador Roberto S. Benedicto. The Sandiganbayan noted that of the 21 sequestration orders against the assets, only two were properly accomplished.
The other 19 orders had only one signature, that of Salonga, in violation of the PCGG rule that each order be signed by at least two commissioners. Fortunately, Salonga’s overriding political dreams would led him out of the PCGG and back into the Senate when elections were held on May 11, 1987. But much of the damage had already been done. The early errors would be stubbornly repeated by succeeding PCGG officials. The Supreme Court, many times, had to uphold the Sandiganbayan or the Ombudsman in their orders dismissing various sequestration cases.
Back in America, the RICO charges filed against the Marcoses failed to prosper. The Los Angeles District Court dismissed the case. The Aquino administration filed an appeal on October 3, 1986, with the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals which dismissed the appeal on June 4, 1987. Another track was tried in 1988.
Presumably, it took the path of least resistance: get the Marcoses to freely surrender at least their gold assets, in return for the promise of reentry to the Philippines. The deal would have to be done away from the glare of publicity, never mind all the talk about transparency.
Mrs. Imelda Romualdez-Marcos would recall later:
“Two close relatives of Mrs. Aquino went to Honolulu to meet with us. In essence, they wanted Marcos to reveal to them the location of the so-called Marcos gold, and the process of their availment and, consequently, they shall set up the mechanism for our return to the Philippines. This was in 1988. Although they presented no written authorization for the negotiations, they said that Mrs. Aquino was fully informed of their mission.
“Exchanges of documents and talks continued from February to July of that year. A list of agreement points was given to Ambassador [Emmanuel] Pelaez for confirmation and transmittal, to which he added that ‘Marcos provide $5 billion to the Philippine government.’ On July 11, 1988, Marcos wrote to Mrs. Aquino, stating his desire to return home, offering reconciliation and support to her administration. She had no reply. A few weeks later, Ambassador Pelaez issued a press statement from Washington, saying: Marcos tried to bribe Aquino with $5 billion for his return.
Realizing that it was all a cruel trick, the Marcoses desisted from further negotiations with President Aquino’s regime or her relatives.
The RICO charges were refiled on October 21, 1988, under circumstances more favorable to the Aquino regime (the review of the Military Bases Agreement having started six months earlier).
Cory Aquino’s relatives in America
ON February 2, 1989, Vice President Laurel got a telephone call from Imelda in Honolulu, requesting him to come over for what could be the farewell message of the ailing President Marcos. The next day, Laurel flew to Honolulu; he was fetched from the airport and taken directly to Saint Francis Hospital. President Marcos was in the intensive care unit. Laurel remembered the message he was given:
“Please tell Mrs. Aquino to stop sending her relatives to me. They are proposing so many things. I have already established a foundation, and I am turning over 90 percent of all my worldly possessions to the Filipino people. Enrique Zobel has all the papers. He and the Papal Nuncio, Monsignor Torpigliani, will sit in the Board and see to it that 90 percent of all that I have are properly distributed to our people. That is much better than what Mrs. Aquino’s relatives have been proposing. I am leaving only 10 percent for my family.
“Lastly, and this is my only request for myself, please help me to be brought home. I want to die in my own country. I want to be buried beside my mother.”
Returning immediately to the Philippines, Laurel tried to see President Aquino, but was told that she was busy. All Laurel wanted were three minutes; he was bitter when he was told that Tom Cruise the American actor got an hour. He left a short note for Cory instead.
Her response, when it came, was for him to disclose the Marcos message directly to the public. He felt that to do so would violate the confidentiality in which the message was entrusted to him. He wanted to give her the message first; then she could make the disclosure to the public.
He never got to deliver the message. Cory informed him that, on February 3, she received “a copy of the letter” of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., on which she did not elaborate. If that letter contained the father’s message, as communicated to Laurel, Cory may have found the references to her relatives and their propositions unpalatable.
The prosecution had presented 95 witnesses and some 350,000 pages of documents, some of them provided by the Swiss government. The proceedings filled 6,578 pages. Cory even had the advantage of having Diane Nicholson, the wife of New York District Court Judge John Keenan, as a schoolmate at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in New York (Mrs. Marcos revealed this in March 1996).
The loss of the RICO case against the Marcoses in 1990 boded ill for similar major lawsuits in the Philippines, insofar as the prosecution depended basically on the same body of evidence.
The main difference is that, while the American judicial system took four years to reach an acquittal, many cases in the Philippines remain pending to this day.
What was noted in June 1999 in the book The Two Billion Dollar Human Rights Uproar still holds true:
“To this day, the government has not won Forfeiture Case 0141, the main litigation to judicially and forever divest the Marcos Estate of its assets. The government has failed to prove that the Marcos assets in question were stolen from the State. But this failure of the prosecution is more onerous on the part of the Marcoses, because for as long as the case drags on, they cannot recover their assets or enjoy even just the fruits thereof.”
To be continued
To reach the writer, e-mail cecilio.arillo@gmail.com.