Justice chief Remulla wants PCGG functions expanded
MANILA, Philippines — Justice Secretary Jesus Crispin Remulla said Thursday he wants the functions of the Presidential Commission on Good Government to be expanded beyond recovering the ill-gotten wealth of the Marcos family and their cronies, in a plan that mirrors President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s pitch for the agency.
“I don’t think we need to spend the next hundred years running after the Marcoses. I don’t think it's going to be that way, might as well make good of something that’s there already, so shift the mandate to something useful for the country and more urgent,” Remulla told reporters at the sidelines of a meeting of the Rotary Club of Manila.
He added that he thinks it is “improbable” for the Marcoses’ estate taxes to bloat to over P200 billion, which he blamed on a “biased computation.”
Remulla’s suggestion, which he said he has floated to the president, is to create a central office tasked to take control of seized assets from the non-payment of taxes, drug trafficking, graft and corruption, and other crimes.
“We have to have a central body so that we know how much we really get for the country from the proceeds of crimes that we are forfeiting in favor of the government and of the people,” he said.
The justice chief said the idea was borne out of discussions within the Department of Justice on the fate of the PCGG, which was first created just days after the ouster of Marcos’ father and namesake, the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr, through a military-backed popular that came to be known as the People Power Revolution.
He said that since the PCGG has training on asset management, “we might as well look into it so that the other assets forfeited by the government will have a management system.”
“This will be a good one, it’s the time really for us to look at how we deal with the proceeds of crimes,” Remulla said.
While critics have been wary that Marcos will abolish the PCGG, which has long battled proposals in Congress to dissolve it, the president said in an interview with DZRJ in March that the agency may either be strengthened or turned into an anti-corruption agency under the executive branch where he now sits as chief.
“Maybe perhaps you could say that the first time it was organized, it was really an anti-Marcos agency, nonetheless we could turn it into a real anti-corruption agency and the job that it was meant to do from the very beginning, has not been finished," he said then.
But former PCGG commissioner Ruben Carranza cautioned in an interview with Philstar.com that the Marcoses are “more devious” than to simply abolish the commission.
“They will, for example, use the PCGG to go after Marcos cronies who they claim only possess ill-gotten wealth temporarily, and should now give that ill-gotten wealth to the Marcoses,” Carranza said. “So under a Marcos presidency, they will use the government, including the PCGG, to get what they claim is the ill-gotten wealth still owed [to] them.”
In its 2020 Annual Report, the PCGG said it had recovered P174.230 billion since its establishment in 1986 until December 31, 2020.
In the same accomplishment report, PCGG said it has an estimated P99.678-billion value of assets under litigation as of the end of 2020. A Rappler report said that as of September 2021, the PCGG has recorded P125.983 billion in assets under litigation. — Xave Gregorio with reports from Kristine Joy Patag
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