P10.5 B available for martial law victims

MANILA, Philippines - If the Marcos compensation bill is passed, the treasury has P10.5 billion to compensate the victims of martial law.

“We still have the money to compensate the Marcos victims. We are doing our best to expedite the passage of the Marcos compensation bill,” Bohol Rep. Rene Relampagos, House human rights committee chairman, said yesterday.

Bureau of Treasury officer-in-charge Christine Sanchez certified the availability of the funds sourced from the forfeited Swiss deposits of the Marcoses.

Relampagos said his committee obtained the certification in the wake of claims that the recovered Marcos wealth has all been diverted to the Agrarian Reform Fund (ARF).                   

It is stipulated in the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law that all recovered Marcos wealth are to be appropriated for the agrarian reform program.                                                           

This legal constraint prevented previous congresses from passing the compensation bill.

The funds will be released on top of the $7.5 million recently awarded by the US federal court, sourced from a $10-million settlement of a case against individuals controlling Texas and Colorado land bought with Marcos money.                                                                                         

Five compensation bills are pending in the human rights committee, which is now consolidating the measures.      

There are around 10,000 listed victims of martial law – imposed by the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos on Sept. 21, 1972 and lasted nominally until 1981 – most prominent among them Sen. Joker Arroyo, former representative Satur Ocampo, and Commission on Human Rights chair Loretta Ann Rosales.

The three have expressed willingness to waive whatever compensation they will receive in favor of other victims.

The Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG), meanwhile, is working on bringing in Marcos era central bank governor Jaime Laya as a state witness in the pending forfeiture case against tycoon Lucio Tan in the Sandiganbayan.

PCGG chairman Andres Bautista said they were able to get a deposition from Laya that the late dictator granted special favors to Tan.

In the case against Tan, the government claims that Marcos owned a controlling share in the business magnate’s firms Asia Brewery, Fortune Tobacco, Foremost Farms, and Allied Bank.

“We’re being aggressive,” Bautista said.

He said getting Laya as a state witness would strengthen the cases filed by the government against Tan and other Marcos cronies.

Laya, a trusted technocrat of Marcos, was also secretary of the defunct Department of Education, Culture and Sports.  

The PCGG, which is mandated to run after the ill-gotten wealth of the Marcos regime, is working under a tight time frame of two years to wind down its affairs and turn over the pending legal cases against the Marcoses and their cronies to the Department of Justice and surrender the recovered assets to the Department of Finance.

To admit Laya as a state witness in the case against Tan, the PCGG would have to file a motion before the Sandiganbayan. The PCGG had filed the forfeiture case on Tan’s assets after the public declaration of Marcos’ widow, former first lady Imelda Marcos, that her husband owned 60 percent of Tan’s firms.

Mrs. Marcos, now Ilocos Norte congresswoman, has submitted to the Sandiganbayan deeds of assignment signed by her husband and Tan showing Marcos’ secret ownership of 60 percent of Tan’s Shareholdings, Inc., the holding company controlling Fortune Tobacco, Asia Brewery, Foremost Farms, and other companies. – With Ranier Allan Ronda