$7-M Marcos jewelry collection excluded from forfeiture case - govt

MANILA, Philippines - Two jewelry collections owned by former First Lady Imelda Marcos were excluded from a government forfeiture case, raising the possibility that these may be returned to her. Worth $7 million or roughly P350 million – the price tag of the elevated U-turns along C-5 Road inaugurated last May – the so-called Roumeliotes and Hawaii collections were both "not covered" by a civil case, the government said. This was acknowledged by a 20-page motion dated June 24, 2009, which was issued by the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG), the government’s legal defender. Sent through postal mail, the pleading only reached the Sandiganbayan, the Philippines’ anti-graft court, on Monday. Only a set of jewelry known as the Malacañang collection was mentioned in Civil Case No. 141, the OSG said. It is worth anywhere from $110,055 to $153,089. Taken together, the collections are worth anywhere from $5.313 million to $7.112 million, based on the 1991 estimates of auction house Christie, Manson and Woods International Inc. In the same motion, government lawyers sought partial summary judgment only over the Malacañang collection. This means that government counsels – including Solicitor General Agnes Devanadera, assistant solicitor general John Emmanuel F. Madamba, state solicitor Magnolia C. Velez, and associate solicitor Moses V. Florendo – sought a Sandiganbayan decision that would take the first step toward claiming the jewels. But at the same time, the OSG asked the anti-graft court to consider “the aggregate value of all the jewelry, among other ill-gotten assets already forfeited" in favor of the government. The same agency also cited a Supreme Court pronouncement saying that the lawful income of the former First Lady and her deceased husband only amounted to $304,372.43. This amount “demonstrates manifest and gross disparity" compared to the value of the jewelry collections alone, the OSG said. The Hawaii jewelry collection was seized from the Marcoses by the United States Customs when they landed in Honolulu after fleeing the Philippines in February 1986. The Malacañang collection was found on February 25, 1986, the same date the Marcos family left the country. These were later turned over to the central bank. Meanwhile, the Roumeliotes collection – the biggest and most expensive of the three – was seized from Greek national Demetriou Roumeliotes while he was at the Manila International Airport on March 1, 1986. Roumeliotes was identified as a friend of the Marcos family. - GMANews.TV