Government lawyers fly to US to check on $37-M Arelma account

MANILA, Philippines – A team of government lawyers from the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) and the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) had gone to the United States to check on the status of the $37-million Arelma account with Merrill Lynch, which was recently sold to Bank of America.

Narciso Nario, PCGG commissioner and concurrent officer-in-charge, said the lawyers, headed by Solicitor General Agnes Devanadera, already returned to the country after leaving last Monday.

“We expect to have a conference with them soon so they can give us a report on what they learned,” Nario, a retired associate justice of the anti-graft court Sandiganbayan, told The STAR.

Nario said the government had also been worried over the status of the Arelma account in view of the sudden merger of the securities firm last month with the US banking giant.

The Arelma account is said to be a securities trading account in Merrill Lynch set up by the late President Ferdinand Marcos with the assistance of his crony, Filipino-Chinese businessman Jose Yao Campos, and a Swiss banker named Jean Luis Sunier in September 1972.

The $2-million initial deposit he posted to create the account was said to have been taken from one of his Swiss dollar accounts.

The account was placed in the name of Arelma Inc., a Panamanian company formed by Sunier, to hide the real owner.

In 1987, a New York federal court ruled in favor of the Philippine government petition and froze the Arelma account at Merrill Lynch.

The Swiss Federal Supreme Court has twice held that Marcos controlled the Arelma account and that he had the power of disposition over it.

Merrill Lynch, founded in 1914, was the largest US brokerage firm before its merger with Bank of America. It was reportedly one of the Wall Street financial institutions hardest hit by the credit crisis caused by the subprime housing mortgage mess with the financial contagion now spreading globally.

It was sold to Bank of America middle of last month for $50 billion.

Over 9,539 human rights victims that won a class suit against the 20-year Marcos regime are asking US courts to forfeit the Arelma account to settle part of the $2-billion award given them by US District Court of Hawaii Judge Manuel Real.

PCGG on a roll

Meanwhile, the PCGG reported that it had recovered P3.3 billion in ill-gotten wealth in the first three quarters of 2008 and eyes an additional P1.2 billion before the year ends.

As of January to Sept. 15, the PCGG recovered and turned over to the government treasury P3,305,266,866.35, according to Nario.

He said the PCGG was also expecting to finally get an additional P1.2 billion in dividends from telecommunications giant Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) in the fourth quarter.

“The money is in the pipeline and we’re just waiting for a court order for its remittance to the treasury,” Nario said.

The P1.2 billion dividends were now deposited in an escrow account, Nario said.

With the recovery of the P3.3 billion and the P1.2 billion PLDT dividends, Nario said the PCGG has already recovered and remitted to the government more than P91 billion since its creation in 1986.

Recently, the PCGG remitted P163,735,222.16 representing proceeds from the sale of the 198,052 Bulletin shares of stocks sold by defendant Hans Menzi Holdings and Management, Inc. (HMHMI) to Bulletin Publishing Corp. in civil case 0022 filed by the PCGG in 1987.