EDITORIAL - Looking the other way

There is ongoing litigation specifically for the government to recover the paintings. So people are mystified by the sale of three prized paintings for nearly $3.6 million by Christie’s auction house in New York.

An 1881 masterpiece by French impressionist Claude Monet fetched the highest price at $2.6 million. British landscape artist Alfred Sisley’s 1897 work was sold for $900,000 while French painter Albert Marquet’s 1946 painting went for $90,000.

The three were part of the staggering treasure trove of fine art that Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos managed to accumulate on a Philippine president’s modest income during their two decades in power. According to published reports, Imelda Marcos bought the Monet painting from an art gallery in 1975 for $138,000, and entrusted it in 1985 to her personal secretary Vilma Bautista.

How could the Marcoses afford such treasures? The three artworks are part of about 200 paintings, which are the subjects of an ongoing civil forfeiture case before the Sandiganbayan.

Procuring paintings normally leaves a paper trail, so it should be relatively easy to pin down the former first lady for unexplained wealth based on her family’s extensive art collection. Yet the forfeiture cases are moving at such a glacial pace in the Sandiganbayan that the artworks under litigation can be sold while the Office of the Solicitor General appears to be either sleeping on the job or looking the other way. Maybe the OSG was too preoccupied last year with its efforts to oust the chief justice. Last month the OSG confirmed in a manifestation before the Sandiganbayan’s Special First Division that the three paintings had been sold, and that the OSG was clueless about the auction.

If this is the way the government is trying to recover ill-gotten wealth from a family accused of mind-boggling plunder, it’s little wonder that the Marcoses have staged a dramatic political comeback. Imelda Marcos was convicted for the first time last year, but for seven counts of graft rather than plunder, which allowed her to remain free while the case crawls along the tortuous path to a final decision. With no political will to go after ill-gotten wealth, she and her family will likely get away with everything.