Imelda’s $10-M gems to be sold

Jewelry once owned by former First Lady Imelda Marcos is to be auctioned overseas, an agency hunting billions of dollars stolen by ex-dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his widow said yesterday.

At least two international auction houses have expressed interest in selling off the trinkets recovered by the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG), Chairman Haydee Yorac said yesterday.

Asked at a forum organized by the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines for a valuation of the jewelry, Yorac said "around 10 million US dollars."

"We are looking at auctioning the jewelry in either Hong Kong, London or New York," Yorac added.

She denied media reports that much of the jewelry now held in the vault of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas was in fact fake. "The jewelry has been independently valued and found to be genuine," she said.

However, Yorac could not be specific on the date of the auction as there was a question mark over jewelry handed over by Imelda Marcos when she and her late husband fled to Hawaii in 1986 after the so-called EDSA I people power revolt.

Marcos, his flamboyant wife and their cronies stole between $5 billion and $10 billion during his 20-year-rule before he was deposed in 1986, according to Yorac.

Imelda Marcos, now in her mid-70s, faces several graft cases linked to her stint in government as housing minister and governor of Metropolitan Manila.

Although the PCGG has been in operation for 18 years it has only recovered cash assets to the value of around P50 billion in the Philippines and $683 million recovered from hidden Swiss bank accounts.

Yorac admitted the process of recovering the stolen wealth had been slow and admitted that when she took over as chairwoman of the PCGG in 2001 she wanted to scrap it "altogether."

She said poor funding and a filing system in total disarray had slowed the process of recovering the money and assets.

Questioned on the future of the government’s 27 percent stake in San Miguel Corp., part of the disputed assets taken from Marcos cronies, Yorac said: "I don’t believe government should be involved in business."

"The best thing we can do with these shares is to sell them on the international market and get the best price we can for the benefit of the Filipino people," she added.

Last October San Miguel chairman Eduardo Cojuangco won provisional control over a disputed 20 percent stake in the country’s biggest brewer.

The decision was seen as a setback in Manila’s efforts to win absolute control of the shares it alleges Cojuangco illegally acquired using embezzled state funds during the Marcos years.

The PCGG sequestered 47 percent of San Miguel shares in the 1980s following the downfall of Marcos. The seized shares included Cojuangco’s 20 percent stake.

The shares are tied up in litigation, with the government alleging that Marcos and Cojuangco used funds from a levy imposed on coconut farmers to acquire the San Miguel stock. — AFP