MANILA, Philippines — Sandiganbayan has ordered Royal Traders Holding Co. Inc. to pay the government at least P373.49 million that the anti-graft court found to be part of the ill-gotten wealth of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his family.
In a 52-page decision, Sandiganbyan also ordered the RTHI, formerly the Traders Royal Bank, to pay 12% interest each year "reckoned from February 1993, until all the amounts are fully paid."
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The court based these amounts — P65.98 million, P30.05 million and $5.44 million ($1:P50.92) — on bank certificates recovered from the Marcoses when they landed in Hawaii in 1986 after fleeing the Philippines.
When the dictator died, his wife Imelda agreed to give the Marcoses' stake in seized items to the Philippine government. In return, the government agreed to drop cases against the family.
But the TRB refused to pay the Presidential Commission on Good Government — the agency tasked with recovering Marcos' ill-gotten wealth — when it tried to collect these amounts in 1993. PCGG then filed a case against TRB in 1997.
NEWSLAB: Money trail: The Marcos billions
Why does this matter?
The ruling in favor of PCGG, representing the Filipino people, is the latest legal recognition of the Marcos family's ill-gotten wealth amid continued attempts to downplay their massive looting of public funds.
In a hearing on the Department of Justice's 2022 budget, the PCGG, an attached agency, told lawmakers at the House of Representatives that it still has to recover P125 billion in ill-gotten wealth.
As of September 2021, PCGG Commissioner John Agbayani said, the agency has recovered a total of P174 billion.
"This amount of money has been distributed to our Agrarian Reform Program in the amount of P79 billion," Agbayani told lawmakers. Another P76 billion, he added, was given to the Coco Levy Trust Fund.
He also said the PCGG has "set aside more or less P11 billion to implement the provisions of the [Human Rights Victims Reparation and Recognition Act of 2013] in order to compensate our human rights victims."