This is a special seed of The Gardener’s Tales
NOTES IN FORM OF A SELECT CHRONOLOGY AS HELP IN ESTIMATING THE MARCOS WEALTH AND WHAT CAN BE DONE ABOUT IT IN THESE TIMES OF UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY
January 01, 1970
Today Marcos announced to the nation that he was giving up all his worldly wealth. He now admitted he was rich. But then came the blockbuster. “You know how I made my pile? I discovered Yamashita’s treasure.”
So, there it was. He said he was rich because of Yamashita’s treasure and he was giving all that up for the Filipino nation in gratitude for their electing him to a second term – the only president ever to be re-elected.
February 13, 1970
Manila could not believe the Marcos Foundation announcement. Student demonstrations became more militant. Protests turned violent. While battles raged, Marcos and Imelda issued handwritten instructions to Markus Geel on this day to establish another kind of foundation, or an account also named as a foundation – one to be kept secret – the Xandy Foundation in Vaduz, the capital city of Liechtenstein. This tiny state between Austria and Switzerland was famous for offering a unique form of corporate structure – a “foundation” called the anstalt – which was really a single-shareholder company protected by the world’s tightest corporate secrecy laws. The CIA and KGB hid their covert funds there. Even Swiss bankers who sometimes had the need to hide money used the anstalten (plural for anstalt).
The Saunders and Ryan accounts were closed and the money transferred to the Xandy Foundation account at Credit Suisse. This would be the first of many foundations set up in this manner with Swiss bankers and lawyers as directors hiding the identities of Marcos and Imelda.
August 26, 1970
The Trinidad Foundation was set up in Vaduz.
January 27, 1971
Roger Roxas (< http://www.state.hi.us/jud/20606.htm >) and his team of treasure hunters discovered a gold statuette of Buddha, almost three feet tall and too heavy to lift. On this day they borrowed a truck and brought the Buddha back to Roger’s house at 47 Ledesma Street in Baguio. It was two in the morning.
When they finally got to weigh the statue they saw that it weighed 2,000 pounds.
A representative from the Treasure Hunters Association in Manila, Louie Mendoza, tested the Buddha and said it was 22-karat, about 92 percent pure gold. Another treasure hunter, First Lieutenant Ken Cheatham of the US Air Force at Clark, came with his friends to see the Buddha and took a lot of photos.
April 5, 1971
At two thirty in the morning of this day, Holy Monday, Marcos’ uncle, Judge Pio Marcos, authorized the search of Roger Roxas’ house because Roger had allegedly violated a Central Bank regulation. The search became messy and violent. At the end of the day, the Buddha was gone.
Roger was picked up, blindfolded and driven to a secret location outside Manila. He thought it was a military camp in Pampanga. He was set free after he signed a confession stating Marcos was not involved in the theft of the Buddha.
June 21, 1971
The Azio Foundation was set up in Vaduz.
September 24, 1971
The Rosalys Foundation was set up in Vaduz.
October 1971
Rosalys Foundation opened a bank account # 51960 at Swiss Bank Corporation. From this day to June 30, 1980, Berlin and Company would transfer up to a total of US$10.3 million into this account.
December 27, 1971
The Charis Foundation was set up in Vaduz.
1973
The Central Bank’s gold reserves dropped to 1,057,000 ounces. Governor Gregorio Licaros claimed that 800,000 ounces (about 22.7 tons) were sold to obtain much needed dollars – which would have brought in $28 million at the official price of $35 an ounce (but note that today at $1300 an ounce, 800,000 ounces would be $1,040,000,000. or 1.04 Billion dollars equivalent to PhP57,200,000,000.00 or 57.2 Billion pesos of today’s exchange rates).
The Philippine Central Bank was a powerful entity in the Philippines. It was equivalent to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve in the US plus most of the functions of the Federal Depositors Insurance Corporation and various state banking commissions. As governor, Licaros had complete discretion in the purchase and sale of gold; he answered to no one except to the President.
A confidential source said that the gold mentioned here was sold not at official but at market value. So, one can now begin to calculate or at least imagine so much gold wealth abroad going up in value by leaps and bounds.
June 22, 1973
Rayby Foundation was established in Vaduz.
May 2, 1973
On this day Fabian Ver wrote Marcos regarding a group code-named Task Force Restoration that was set up to recover treasure at Fort Bonifacio and Fort Santiago.
September 1974
Olof Jonsson, noted psychic, and a friend, Cary Calloway, flew to Manila accompanied by Norman Kirst, who had just met Jonsson and offered to sponsor the trip. The trip was on Marcos’ invitation with a view to treasure hunting. Later, Kirst called Bob Curtis in Reno, Nevada and invited him to be part of the group. Curtis supposedly possessed a new technology for extracting more gold per ton of material.
The idea of Marcos was to launder gold bars by melting them down and reprocessing them in order to eliminate identifying marks and to refine their purity.
The team included Villacrusis, Amelito Mutuc, Cesar Leyran, Ben Valmores, Pol Giga and Mario Lachica.
They called themselves the LEBER GROUP. Effective January 1, 1975, Americans could legally buy and possess gold. Gold markets all over the world were already buzzing with increased activity. Marcos was not ignorant of this fact; nor was his close friend, Richard Nixon.
December 1974
Charis Foundation was renamed Scolari. The purpose was not clear – perhaps to throw future investigators off their trail.
1974-1977
Through these three years gold reserves stayed at exactly the same figure of 1,056,000 ounces – which experts considered a statistical impossibility. They had never stayed at the same level before, even for two years running.
March 11, 1975
Marcos invited Jonsson, Kirst, and Curtis for an overnight cruise on the presidential yacht. They went to Corregidor afterwards. Marcos had an office below which was a room that Ver took them to – about thirty square feet of gold bars stacked from floor to ceiling. They noticed the bars had what appeared to be Chinese markings.
March 1975 – July 1976
Marcos’ highway commissioner, Baltazar Aquino, went to Hong Kong at least ten times to collect “commissions” totalling $4,539,786.60 owed to Marcos by Japanese suppliers of the Philippine highways ministry.
July 2-3, 1975
Jack Anderson’s Washington Post column mentioned that Marcos was looking for “buried World War II Japanese treasure in the Sierra Madre.“ Actually it was at a land site near Teresa, Rizal – at the foot of the Sierra Madre – that excavation began in mid-May of this year on orders of Fabian Ver following a map that showed a main tunnel about 300 yards long, fifty feet wide, and forty feet high with side tunnels at both ends of about 100 yards long – a site excavated for the Japanese by several hundred American, Australian and Filipino prisoners of war who were then killed and buried with the treasure.
September 1976
This month the Marcoses bought their first property in the U.S. – a condo in the exclusive Olympic Towers on Fifth Avenue in New York. Five months later they would also buy the three adjoining apartments, paying a total of $4,000,000.00 for the four and using Antonio Floirendo’s company, Theaventures Limited in Hong Kong, as front for these purchases.
January 01, 1977
On New Year’s Eve, Licaros had a problem. Foreign creditors wanted enough international reserves to cover three or four months of import requirements but there was only enough to cover two months. Today, New Year’s Day, Licaros had a solution taken straight from that book, “Alice in Wonderland.” There would be a new definition for the term “international reserves.”
The term originally meant “all gold, foreign exchange assets of the Central Bank, and net foreign exchange holdings of the commercial banks.” The new definition excluded the net foreign exchange holdings of the commercial banks because it had become an increasingly larger negative figure. Why? Because they were borrowing more and more dollars. Plus the new definition now included the Central Bank’s borrowing as part of its foreign exchange assets. Thus, with the stroke of a pen, the value of the reserves almost doubled, from $844.7 million to $1.525 billion, which was about 4.7 months of import requirements. Problem “solved.”
August 1977
Marcos’ friend Eulogio Balao was head of the Philippine Reparations Mission in Japan and collected commissions there in yen, then used his diplomatic status to take the yen out of Japan, go to Hong Kong, and change it to US dollars at Berlin and Company, a foreign exchange dealer.
After Balao died in August 1977, Andres Genito, Jr., set up the Angenit Investment Corporation to receive the kickbacks and opened an account at Wing Lung Bank in Hong Kong. Berlin and Company transferred HK$44,030,378.00 from its account in Hang Lung Bank to Wing Lung Bank.
October 13, 1977
Today, after addressing the UN General Assembly, Imelda celebrated by going shopping and spending $384,000 including $50,000 for a platinum bracelet with rubies; $50,000 for a diamond bracelet; and $58,000 for a pin set with diamonds.
The day before, Vilma Bautista, one of her private secretaries, paid $18,500 for a gold pendant with diamonds and emeralds; $9,450 for a gold ring with diamonds and emeralds; and $4,800 for a gold and diamond necklace.
October 27, 1977
The Marcoses donated $1.5 million to Tufts University in Boston, endowing a professorial chair in East Asian and Pacific Studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. But the students and professors discovered this and forced the school to reject the donation. To save face, the Marcoses were allowed to finance several seminars and lectures. This should have been the beginning of the realization that money would not be able to buy everything.
November 2, 1977
Still at her shopping spree, Imelda paid $450,000 for a gold necklace and bracelet with emeralds, rubies, and diamonds; $300,000 for a gold ring with emeralds and diamonds; and $300,000 for a gold pendant with diamonds, rubies, and thirty-nine emeralds.
April 17, 1978
Today Marcos signed PD 602 ordering all gold producers to sell to the Central Bank. In September he inaugurated the new Central Bank Gold Refinery and Mint in Quezon City.
June 1978
Steve Psinakis conducts his own investigation into the Marcos treasure hunts. The results are printed in a twenty-four-part series in the Philippine News beginning this month, June 1978.Photos and documents added to the articles’ credibility.
The year before, on October 1977, Psinakis masterminded the dramatic escape of his brother-in-law Eugenio Lopez Jr. and Sergio Osmena III. They broke out of a prison in Manila and flew to Hong Kong on a private aircraft. From there they were flown to the U.S. and granted political asylum.
July 1978
After a trip to Russia, Imelda arrived in New York and spent some time in the stores. She started with paying $193,320 for antiques, including $12,000 for a Ming Period side table; $24,000 for a pair of Georgian mahogany Gainsborough armchairs; $6,240 for a Sheraton double-sided writing desk; $11,600 for a George II wood side table with marble top – all in the name of the Philippine consulate to dodge New York sales tax.
That was merely for starters.
A week later she spent $2,181,000.00 in one day! This included $1,150,000 for a platinum and emerald bracelet with diamonds from Bulgari; $330,000 for a necklace with a ruby, diamonds, and emeralds; $300,000 for a ring with heart-shaped emeralds; $78,000 for 18-carat gold ear clips with diamonds; $300,000 for a pendant with canary diamonds, rubies and emeralds on a gold chain.
After New York, she dropped by Hong Kong where a Cartier representative admitted it was this Filipina, Imelda, who had put together the world’s largest collection of gems – in 1978.
November 21, 1978
Two representatives of Standard Chartered Hong Kong Trustee, Ltd. – P.A.L. Vine and Lai Wai Hung visited Malacanang palace. A trust agreement was drawn up. Vine returned to Manila on December 5, 1980, and met with Rolando Gapud, Marcos’ chief financial advisor and Gapud’s erstwhile boss, Jose Y. Campos, one of Marcos’ close friends. Two trust accounts – a dollar account and a peso account – were opened at Security Bank and Trust Company (SBTC). Campos was signatory for Marcos. These two accounts were owned by the trust in Hong Kong, which was owned and controlled by Marcos and Imelda.
Afterward, ten other trust accounts were opened at SBTC 7700, 7710, 7720, etc. and a deed of trust was executed between Standard Chartered and Security Bank for each account.
For example, the deed of trust for account 7730 was between Beneficio Investment, Inc., a Panamanian Corporation, and SBTC. That account owned Beneficio Investment, whose bearer shares were held by Standard Chartered for Marcos and Imelda.
Aside from the Hong Kong accounts, other accounts were opened in Switzerland: in Credit Suisse, Banque Paribas, Lombard Odier et Cie, Swiss Bank Corporation, Swiss Volksbank, Finanz AG, Trade Development Bank and Bank Hoffman.
Accounts were opened at Barclays in London.
Also at offshore banks in Cayman Islands and New Hebrides.
In the US eighty-three accounts were opened in nine banks, including Lloyds Bank and California Overseas Bank in Los Angeles, Redwood Bank in San Francisco, and Irving Trust, Citibank, Chase Manhattan, Chemical Bank, and Manufacturers Hanover in New York.
The money just kept pouring in.
Lucio Tan paid Marcos Php100 million a year. According to Gapud, Tan “belongs to the group that could get presidential decrees and letters of instruction from Mr Marcos for their joint benefit.” Marcos demanded and got 60 percent of the shares of Lucio Tan’s holding company, Shareholdings Inc. which owned Fortune Tobacco, Asia Brewery, Allied bank, and Foremost Farms.
What applied to Tan was also true of the other cronies like Ricardo Silverio of Delta Motors. About PhP 10,000,000 in cash were deposited weekly in the SBTC accounts and then wire transferred to accounts in Hong Kong and from there to Swiss bank accounts controlled by the foundations.
As chief financial advisor, Gapud acquired hundreds of millions of dollars of shares in a multitude of companies – shares endorsed in blank by the original owner making them bearer certificates and allowing Marcos to avoid direct involvement but assuring him secret controlling interest in almost every industry in the nation – banking, insurance, mining, shipping, oil, sugar, coconut, manufacturing, construction, etc.
November 23, 1978
A house was purchased at 4 Capshire Drive in Cherry Hill, New Jersey (actually near to Philadelphia where Bongbong was taking courses at that time) for use by servants and Bongbong’s security detachment.
The Marcoses did not neglect their annual real estate purchase. During this year and next year, 1979, they purchased two properties – one at 3850 Princeton Pike, Princeton – a 13-acre estate for use by daughter Imee as she attended Princeton. The other was a house at 19 Pendleton Drive in Cherry Hill for use of Bongbong and under the name of Tristan Beplat, erstwhile head of the American Chamber of Commerce in the Philippines.
April 1979
In two days in New York this month, Imelda spent $280,000 for a necklace wet with emeralds and diamonds; $18,500 for a yellow gold evening bag with one round cut diamond; $8,975.20 for 20-carat gold ear clips with twenty-four baguette diamonds; $8,438.10 for 18-carat gold ear clips with fifty-two tapered baguette diamonds; and $12,056.50 for 20 carat gold ear clips with diamonds. -end of Part 2-