Compensation

One of the most memorable revelations of Juan Ponce Enrile when he turned his back on the Marcos regime was that he staged an ambush on his own convoy in 1972, giving Ferdinand Marcos a pretext to declare martial law.

Enrile disclosed this in 1986 when Marcos was still around to refute the story. The fallen dictator never did.

Now that Marcos’ remains are preserved like an exhibit at Madame Tussauds, Enrile has changed his tune, saying the ambush was real.

He has also washed his hands of the ruinous coups staged during the first Aquino administration by his protégés in the military reformist movement.

We don’t know if Enrile is an incorrigible liar, or if this is finally the truth and nothing but… or if this is a manifestation of Alzheimer’s. I’ll just wait for his unauthorized biography to be written. Anyway, for those of us whose reading fare these days is limited to Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, 700 pages of one man’s version of history is a heavy read.

If the Senate president wants to downplay his responsibility for the atrocities perpetrated during martial law, it may be better for him to shepherd the passage of Senate Bill 2615 in his chamber. This is the counterpart of House Bill 5990, which the larger chamber passed on March 21 this year.

Enactment of this measure will pave the way for the payment of $200 million as compensation to victims of human rights abuses during the Marcos regime.

SB 2615 was filed way back in November 2010 by Sen. Sergio Osmeña III, himself a martial law victim. The $200 million is to be sourced from $623 million ($685 million with interest) in Marcos deposits returned to the Philippines by Swiss banks. The money will be divided among 10,000 registered human rights victims, although authorities believe the number can go up to 30,000.

That’s $68,500 each (more than P2.8 million at current rates) for 10,000 victims.

It’s unfortunate that the Americans beat us to the award of compensation for Filipino human rights victims. Judge Manuel Real of the US District Court of Hawaii ordered the payment last year of $7.5 million to 7,526 claimants. The money came from the settlement of a case with a Marcos crony over properties in Colorado and Texas. While each claimant received only $1,000, it was the first case of compensation for victims of the Marcos dictatorship.

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Significantly, the compensation bill was not among the priority measures announced by President Aquino in his State of the Nation Address last July. Maybe the government is reluctant to forgo earnings on the funds.

When the Swiss government made an emergency decision to freeze suspicious Marcos deposits on March 24, 1986, shortly after the people power revolt, the amount covered was $535 million. Actual return or restitution of the funds had to wait for a final determination by Philippine courts that the deposits were ill-gotten. This is required in international legal assistance cases.

In December 1997, the Swiss Supreme Court cleared the way for the fund transfer. But the final Philippine ruling on the nature of the wealth was handed down only in 2003. By that time, the funds had grown to $685 million.

In January 2004, the money was transferred to the National Treasury from the Philippine National Bank.

By 2007, the amount stood at $718 million with interest. According to data from the Department of Budget and Management at the time, $598.299 million of the amount was invested in bonds and $23.337 million in stocks.

The Philippines informed Switzerland that using the $200 million to compensate the victims required legislation.

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Human rights victims aren’t the only ones waiting for the release of the funds.

Swiss authorities also find it significant that the Marcos case was the first time that their country, long seen as a haven for the money of despots, Nazis and their kindred spirits, restituted to a foreign government a dictator’s bank deposits confirmed to be ill-gotten.

The Marcos deposits and the $700 million traced to Nigerian military dictator Sani Abacha and returned to that country are considered by the Swiss to be their most significant restitution cases.

Abacha and Marcos are classified as “politically exposed persons” or PEP by the Swiss. That’s the same term you heard during the impeachment trial of former chief justice Renato Corona. For PEPs, the world is getting smaller for laundering dirty money, thanks to tighter international regulation.

Over the past 15 years, Switzerland has restituted a total of $1.7 billion in PEP assets to the countries of origin.

Based on the same constitutional emergency provision used in the Marcos case in 1986, Swiss authorities froze the assets of relatives and entourage of Tunisia’s Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali ($65 million) and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak ($700 million) at the start of the Arab Spring. As in the Marcos case, the illegal nature of the funds must first be established by the country of origin before the Swiss can restitute the money.

Another $106 million in Syrian and Libyan assets have been frozen by the Swiss.

The precedent set by the Marcos case laid the groundwork for future restitutions and was incorporated in the provisions of the United Nations Convention Against Corruption, Swiss Ambassador Ivo Sieber told me last week.

“Today these principles reverberate more relevant than ever in the context of the recent revolutions in Northern Africa,” he said.

“The Marcos case was the first time the Swiss authorities froze the funds held by a former dictator in Switzerland and then restituted it to the country where it was looted,” he told me. “In doing so while at the same time arranging that funds would also be used to compensate the human rights victims that suffered under the regime, the Philippine-Swiss cooperation set a compelling international precedent.”

The idea that you can’t take the money and run, and worse, that your dirty money could end up in the pockets of your victims, should discourage the emergence of corrupt despots.

In the Philippines, victims are still waiting for that message to sink in, even as there are attempts to rewrite the history of the oppressive years.