The Marcos family, a political family in the Philippines, owns different assets that Philippine courts have determined to have been acquired through illicit means during the presidency of Ferdinand Marcos from 1965–1986.Tiongson-Mayrina, Karen and GMA News Research.September 21, 2017. The Supreme Court's rulings on the Marcoses' ill-gotten wealth. https://www.gmanetwork.com/news/news/specialreports/626576/the-supreme-court-s-rulings-on-the-marcoses-ill-gotten-wealth/story/ These assets are referred to using several terms, including "ill-gotten wealth" and "unexplained wealth," while some authors such as Belinda Aquino and Philippine Senator Jovito Salonga more bluntly refer to it as the "Marcos Plunder".
Legally, the Philippine Supreme Court defines this as the assets the Marcoses acquired beyond the amount legally declared by Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos in the president's statements of assets and liabilities—which amounts to only about US$13,500.00 from his salary as president. The court also deems that such wealth should be forfeited and turned over to the government or to the human rights victims of Marcos's authoritarian regime. Estimates of the amount the Marcoses reportedly acquired in the last few years of the Marcos administration range from US$5 billion to $13 billion. No exact figures can be determined for the amount acquired through the entire 21 years of the Marcos regime, but prominent Marcos-era economist Jesus Estanislao has suggested that the amount could be as high as US$30 billion.
Among the sources of the Marcos wealth are alleged to be: diverted foreign economic aid (e.g. Marcos Japanese ODA scandal), US Government military aid (including huge discretionary funds at Marcos disposal as a "reward" for sending some Filipino troops to Vietnam) and kickbacks from public works contracts over a two-decades-long rule.
This wealth includes: real estate assets both within the Philippines and in several other countries, notably the United States; collections of jewelry and artwork; shares and other financial instruments; bank accounts, both in the Philippines and overseas, notably Switzerland, the United States, Singapore, and the British Virgin Islands; and in some instances, actual cash assets.
Some of this wealth has been recovered as the result of various court cases, either as funds or properties returned to the Philippine government, or by being awarded as reparations to the victims of human rights abuses under Marcos's presidency. Philippine Supreme Court, Sandiganbayan, and courts abroad have issued convictions or rulings that confirm the plunder of Ferdinand Marcos and Imelda Marcos, Marcos family members, and cronies. Some of the stolen wealth has been recovered by the Philippine government through settlements and compromise deals, either with the Marcoses themselves or with cronies who said that certain properties had been entrusted to them by the Marcoses. Some of the recovery cases have been dismissed by the courts for reasons including improper case filing procedures and technical issues with documentary evidence. An unknown amount is not recoverable because the full extent of the Marcos wealth is unknown.
Estimates Estimates of the alleged ill-gotten wealth of the Marcos family vary, with most sources accepting a figure of about US$5 billion–10 billion for wealth acquired in the last years of the Marcos administration, but with rough extreme estimates of wealth acquired since the 1950s going as high as US$30 billion.
In a 1985 report to the United States Congress House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Stephen Bosworth estimated that the Marcoses had stolen an accumulated wealth of US$10 billion "in recent years", in the context of the rapid decline of the Philippine economy in the early 1980s. The same figure was cited by the Philippines' Office of the Solicitor General soon after Marcos was deposed by the EDSA Revolution in 1986.
Bosworth's source, Dr. Bernardo Villegas of the Philippine think tank the Center for Research and Communication (CRC), noted that the rough 10 billion figure ultimately cited by Bosworth was already well below the conservative estimate which can be derived from an analysis of the Philippines' import and export figures. In an interview with the Catholic newspaper Veritas, Villegas cited economic data gathered by the CRC saying that the conservative figure for the Marcoses' unexplained wealth would be a minimum of $13.145 billion, and could be as high as $30 billion. Villegas noted that his analysis was based on figures tabulated by the CRC from 1977 to 1985, and added that the hidden wealth was self-evident, saying "kitang kita ang ebidensya" ("the evidence is very visible").
The PCGG's first chair Jovito Salonga later said that he estimated figure of US$5 billion–10 billion, based on the documentary trail left behind by the Marcoses in 1986. Internationally, Salonga's estimate has become the popularly cited estimate of the Marcoses' unexplained wealth, and it is this amount for which the Marcoses were cited by Guinness World Records as having perpetrated the "largest-ever theft from a government" in 1989 — a record they are still holding in 2024.
However, Dr. Jesus Estanislao, another noted economist from the Center for Research and Communication, pointed out that this figure reflected amounts taken out of the country in the years immediately prior to the ouster of the Marcos administration, and that there was no way to accurately estimate the wealth acquired by the Marcoses since the 1950s when he was in the legislature, and the mid-1960s when he became president. Estanislao suggested that the figure could be closer to $30 billion.
Means of acquisition Among the sources of the Marcos wealth are alleged to be diverted foreign economic aid, US Government military aid (including huge discretionary funds at Marcos disposal as a "reward" for sending some Filipino troops to Vietnam) and kickbacks from public works contracts over a two-decade-long rule.
According to Jovito Salonga in his book Presidential Plunder—which details Salonga's time as head of the Presidential Commission on Good Government—these cronies helped the Marcoses amass his wealth by aiding him in one or more of what Salonga called "Marcos' Techniques of Plunder".
These techniques, says Salonga, were: creating monopolies and putting them under the control of cronies; awarding behest loans to cronies from Government banking or financing institutions; forced takeovers of various public or private enterprises, with a nominal amount as payment; direct raiding of the public treasury and government financing institutions; Issuance of Presidential Decrees or orders, enabling cronies to amass wealth; kickbacks and commissions from enterprises doing business in the Philippines; use of shell corporations and dummy companies to launder money overseas; skimming off of Foreign Aid and other forms of International Assistance; and hiding wealth in overseas bank accounts using pseudonyms or code names.
In 1992, Imelda Marcos claimed without evidence that Yamashita's gold accounted for the bulk of the family wealth.
Agency in charge of recovery
Shortly after Marcos was removed through the 1986 People Power revolution, a quasi-judicial government agency named the Presidential Commission on Good Government was created, with the primary mandate of recovering ill-gotten wealth accumulated by the Marcoses, their relatives, subordinates, and close associates, whether located in the Philippines or abroad. It was also tasked with investigating other cases of graft and corruption; and instituting of corruption prevention measures.
Two years later in 1998, the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law mandated that the funds recovered by the PCGG be automatically appropriated to fund the Philippines' agrarian reform programs. Since then, assets recovered from the Marcoses by the PCGG has funded more than 80 percent of the Philippines' budget for agrarian reform. On January 28, 2013, the Philippine Congress enacted the Human Rights Victims Reparation and Recognition Act of 2013 (Republic Act No. 10368). Through this law, the Philippine government acknowledged its moral and legal obligation to recognize and/or provide reparation for the victims of human rights violations during the Marcos regime. For this purpose, Congress allocated ₱10 billion from funds transferred to the Philippine government by virtue of the December 10, 1997, Order of the Swiss Federal Supreme Court, adjudged by the Supreme Court of the Philippines as final and executory in Republic vs. Sandiganbayan on July 15, 2003, (G.R. No. 152154) as Marcos ill-gotten wealth and forfeited in favor of the Republic of the Philippines.
Overseas real estate properties
Some of the most tangible examples of the unexplained wealth of the Marcos family are the various overseas real estate properties that the Marcoses acquired while they were in power.
The best known of these properties are the Marcoses' multi-million dollar real estate investments in the United States, particularly Imelda's purchases of buildings and real estate in New York, the estates purchased in New Jersey for the use of the Marcos children, Jose Yao Campos's investments in Seattle, various properties in Hawaii including the Makiki Heights estate where they lived during their exile, and their ownership of the California Overseas Bank in Los Angeles. According to Ricardo Manapat's book Some Are Smarter Than Others, which was one of the earliest to document details of the Marcos wealth, lesser known properties include gold and diamond investments in South Africa, banks and hotels in Israel, and various land-holdings in Austria, the United Kingdom and Italy.
Many of these properties are to have been acquired under the name of several Marcos cronies. One of them, Campos, cooperated with the Philippine Government and made an immunity deal, revealing how he fronted Marcos' investments both locally and abroad via numerous inter-locking shell corporations.
Marcos mansions in the Philippines
Aside from the overseas properties, there are fifty-or-so "Marcos mansions" acquired by the Marcos family within the Philippines itself. Locations of these "Marcos mansions" include properties in Philippines' "Summer Capital" of Baguio, in the Ilocos region where the Marcoses trace their ancestry, Leyte where Imelda Marcos's family came from, and throughout the Greater Manila Area and its outskirts.
Some of these properties are titled in the name of Marcos family members, but others are titled in the name of identified "Marcos cronies" while being reserved for the use of the Marcos family. In some cases, several such mansions were located close together, with specific mansions meant for individual members of the family, as was the case of the Marcos mansions on Outlook Drive in Baguio. Many of the Marcos mansions were sequestered by the Philippine government when the Marcoses were expelled from the country as a result of the 1986 EDSA Revolution.
The Marcos jewels
Also sequestered by the PCGG in 1986 were three sets of Imelda Marcos's jewelry, which have collectively come to be known as the "Marcos jewels" or "Imelda jewels."