The Naga lot is among the 581.33 million pesos (US$10 million) worth of recovered and sequestered Marcos Sr-era assets that the Commission on Audit flagged as being poorly preserved. - GOOGLE MAPS
MANILA: Having neither fencing nor security, the property acted as a magnet to squatters who made it their home.
It had been seized by the Philippine government after being linked to graft cases arising from the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. But a government audit in 2024 found that the property in Naga City, south of Manila, was illegally occupied by at least 15 informal settler families.
Sitting on a 5,952sq m lot, it was once owned by the now-defunct Banahaw Broadcasting Corporation, a firm run by Marcos Sr’s crony Roberto Benedicto.
The company took over the broadcast frequencies of local news network ABS-CBN in 1973, a year after Marcos Sr declared martial law, and operated until the 1986 People Power revolt toppled the dictatorship.
The Naga lot is among the 581.33 million pesos (S$12.8 million) worth of recovered and sequestered Marcos Sr-era assets that the Commission on Audit flagged as being poorly preserved. The commission is tasked with annually auditing all Philippine government agencies’ spending and performance to help ensure accountability and transparency.
The reason behind this? Weak planning and chronic underfunding of the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG), the body set up after the 1986 revolution to recover wealth amassed during the Marcos Sr dictatorship.
Some of these assets are deteriorating from neglect, while others sit unsecured or without updated valuations at the central bank.
Experts say this is a slow erosion of assets meant to symbolise the country’s reckoning with one of South-east Asia’s most notorious kleptocracies.
Marcos Sr’s 20-year rule – which included nine years of brutal martial law from 1972 to 1981 – was marred by massive corruption, media censorship, and the killings, torture and disappearances of government critics.
The findings underscore a deeper contradiction: The late dictator’s only son and namesake, incumbent President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, projects a renewed anti-corruption drive involving flood control infrastructure projects nearly four decades after his father’s overthrow. Yet at the same time, the assets representing the dictatorship’s ill-gotten wealth are showing signs of neglect and erosion.
The Philippines has previously estimated that about US$5 billion (S$6.46 billion) to US$10 billion was siphoned off during the Marcos Sr dictatorship, with the Guinness World Records describing it as the “greatest robbery of a government”.
The Commission on Audit noted that the PCGG’s annual budget has remained below 24 million pesos for four consecutive years, which is far below the ceiling of up to 10 per cent of asset-sale proceeds allowed by law.
This limits the commission’s ability to secure, maintain and properly value recovered assets.
The PCGG has so far recovered about 280 billion pesos in ill-gotten wealth from the Marcoses and their cronies, including Swiss bank deposits, shares of stock, real estate, artworks and jewellery.
The Straits Times has sought comment from the PCGG but it did not respond.
Ruben Carranza, a former PCGG commissioner now with the International Centre for Transitional Justice, said the audit’s findings should be read within the commission’s unusually broad and technically demanding mandate.
“It’s very sui generis work. It’s very distinct. There is no precedent nor in a way a parallel function in government that combines all the functions in one commission,” Carranza told ST.
Even so, he said the problems flagged by the Commission on Audit were neither new nor surprising as asset deterioration is a recurring issue across the Philippine bureaucracy.
The challenge is sharper, he added, when the state is forced to manage assets it was never meant to own, such as private aircraft, works of art and luxury goods acquired using ill-gotten wealth.
Lengthy litigation and repeated delays often leave assets idle and exposed, shrinking their worth long before the state can benefit from them.
The PCGG has reported average recoveries of more than two billion pesos a year since Mr Marcos took office in 2022, far higher than in previous administrations. But Mr Carranza said these figures largely reflect the delayed sale of assets secured through cases won years earlier.
“It can only be a Marcos accomplishment if he himself admits that their family stole and then surrenders the assets,” he said.
Neither Marcos nor members of his family have apologised for the corruption and human rights abuses committed under the dictatorship. While the President is the court-appointed administrator of his father’s estate, he has repeatedly deflected questions about ill-gotten wealth, often referring reporters to the family’s lawyers.
At the same time, an investigation by Philippine news site Rappler found that since 2022, the Marcos family and their associates won 11 of the ill-gotten wealth cases filed against them before the anti-graft court.
This nearly matches the total number of such wins across the combined 12 years of the previous Aquino and Duterte administrations.
Political scientist Aries Arugay, a visiting senior fellow at Singapore’s ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, said these developments explain the scepticism over Marcos’ ongoing anti-corruption drive, 39 years after his dictator-father was deposed.
“Many already were doubtful given the background of his family. They’re almost synonymous with the word ‘corruption’ since there have been actual convictions (related to their ill-gotten wealth cases),” he said.
Dr Arugay described the PCGG’s gradual weakening as part of a larger pattern in Philippine governance. He noted that the commission remains exposed to shifting political priorities and “became subject to the whims of whoever is in Malacanang (presidential palace)”.
“It only means that in the Philippines, impunity reigns more than accountability,” he said. “These institutions are hollowed out, politicised and later disempowered.” - The Straits Times/ANN
