Philippines to sell Marcos jewelry valued at $21 million
ASSOCIATED PRESS / NOV. 2015
Christie’s auction house appraiser David Warren examines a set of jewelry from Roumeliotes Collection, one of three sets of the Marcos Jewelry Collection, during appraisal at the Central Bank of the Philippines, in Manila, Philippines on Nov. 24.
ASSOCIATED PRESS / NOV. 2015
A Bureau of Customs appraiser shows to the media a set of jewelry from Roumeliotes Collection, one of three sets of the Marcos Jewelry Collection, during appraisal at the Central Bank of the Philippines, in Manila on Nov. 24.
MANILA » The Philippine government has approved the public exhibit and auction of the jewelry collection of late dictator Ferdinand Marcos’ widow Imelda which international experts have appraised to be now worth at least 1 billion pesos ($21 million), officials said Monday.
The hoard was seized when Marcos and his family fled to Hawaii in 1986 following a popular revolt that ended his two decades in power. They include a 25-carat, barrel-shaped diamond worth at least $5 million and a Cartier diamond tiara that is now many times more valuable than the previous estimate of $30,000 to $50,000.
Andrew de Castro of the Presidential Commission on Good Government, an agency tasked to recover the Marcoses’ ill-gotten wealth, said they hope to hold the exhibit and auction before the end of President Benigno Aquino III’s term in June, when the terms for the current members of the commission also end.
The government’s Privatization Council headed by the Department of Finance last week approved the sale of the jewelry. A portion of the collection seized at the presidential palace when the Marcoses fled, however, is still being contested in court. Other pieces of jewelry were seized in Hawaii and at Manila’s airport.
“The jewelry confiscated from the Marcoses remain a singular manifestation of the misguided priorities of the Marcos presidency during his reign,” commission Chairman Richard Amurao said Friday.
19 responses to “Philippines to sell Marcos jewelry valued at $21 million”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
So what. The PHILLIPPINE government will get $21million and then squander it away with their corruption and kickbacks.
With the glare of the Press, perhaps much good will come from the sale?
It’s to help pay the graft.
Of course, faces change but not their corrupt ways. It’s ingrained into their culture. While most of their neighboring countries have progressed economically (in spite of corruption problems too), PI have fallen behind and still relies heavily on money coming back from their #1 export – cheap labor.
I heard that many more hidden and buried gold mines exist around the smaller islands of the Philippines by Marcos.
Are they gonna sell Imelda’s houseful of shoes too?
After all these years, they probably don’t smell like toejams any more.
That corrupt family has two left feet.
The Marcos’ were horrible people, and we supported them all the way up to the point that their people had enough. I will never forget the image in my mind of them being greeted by the Ariyoshis with lei when they arrived hear as criminals.
Marcos should have fled to Iran where he could be stoned to death.
Imelda absolutely needed the jewelry to go with her shoes.
We have CZ now a days.
I served under President Corazon Aquino’s administration, and provided oversight of palace art holdings, the bulk of which were Marcos purchases of fine and applied arts. There were two lithographs by Salvador Dali, a framed work by William Turner, a work on paper depicting a child by Mary Cassatt, as well as discovering seventeen (17) pieces of Grandma Moses works (mounted on public exhibit by the Museo ng Malacanang Foundation). I hope these works were turned over to the PCGG by the Ramos administration. I also assisted in the deaccession and sale of Continental Silver under Sotheby’s, parts of which were displayed and auctioned off at their London branch. Sales proceeds were used by the Aquino government to benefit its Agrarian Reform initiative.
Curious, do you mean JMW Turner? Which one? They’re pretty well known and catalogued.
You mean the money got misspent.
Were you drooling?
Unrepentant criminals who enriched themselves on the backs of their starving “subjects”. There’s a special place in Hell reserved for these two.
Nobody is famished in Hawaii, except in our public school’s quality of education.
How can one man, who fed off of the citizens of his country, even look into a mirror and call himself a leader?
What’s worse is how an American Governor and his wife could continue to place him on a pedestal. Shame on you George.