Marcos Wealth Brings Bitter Memories To Buddha Finder Heir
THE CLAIM
of former first lady Imelda Marcos that her family had 4,000 tons of
gold confirms the long-told story that her husband, former President
Ferdinand Marcos, had something to do with the disappearance of the
Golden Buddha in Baguio City 27 years ago.
In fact, Ms Marcos's admission that came out in an aborted series of articles in the Inquirer last year, has ruffled anew bitter memories of the heirs of Buddha finder Rogelio Roxas.
''The statue could have been melted and perhaps formed into bars,'' Henry Roxas, Rogelio's eldest son, told the Inquirer. ''We could not help but think that part of the Marcos wealth came from the Buddha.''
In April 1971, government soldiers swooped down on Roxas's house at Aurora Hill in Baguio and forcibly took the Golden Buddha, which the treasure hunter said he found in a tunnel near the Baguio General Hospital.
The statue, which Rogelio described as made of pure gold with precious gems stuffed in its hollow torso, has never been seen since.
Marcos denied having a hand in the statue's disappearance but the locksmith-turned-treasure hunter had always claimed the men who seized the Buddha were acting on orders of the former strongman.
Roxas died under mysterious circumstances in 1993, a few years after Golden Buddha Corp. based in Atlanta, Georgia, was formed.
The company was supposed to continue Roxas's legal claims over the statue against the estate of the Marcoses, who were then forced into exile in Hawaii after a people's uprising in 1986.
Henry Roxas said the Golden Buddha weighed one ton. ''The statue was taken from our house together with the 17 gold bars. That's why with Imelda's revelations, we should not be blamed if we will believe that part of her claims actually came from my father.''
Marcos had been reported to have found gold treasures amassed by the Japanese Imperial Army headed by the late Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita during World War II.
''And so was the Buddha,'' Henry said. ''My father led an expedition to search for the statue after a Japanese oldtimer tipped him of the statue's whereabouts.''
Last month, Ms Marcos admitted to the Inquirer that her husband successfully increased his gold hoard from 1,000 to 4,000 tons in the 1970s.
She said her husband used their wealth to build roads, bridges, hospitals and schools for the benefit of the majority of Filipinos.
Too fantastic
Many people scoffed at the volume of gold Ms Marcos and her husband had, saying the claim was too fantastic.
Henry said he also believed that. But he insisted the Marcoses really had gold and part of it should be owned by the Roxas family.
He rued the Hawaii Supreme Court ruling that reversed a decision of the Hawaii district court awarding $22 billion in damages to GBC in 1996. The Hawaii district court ruling was considered one of the largest damage awards in history.
In a decision in November last year, the Hawaii Supreme Court found the evidence against the Marcoses too speculative to support Roxas's claim of discovering the fabled statue and its seizure from him in 1971.
''We were hoping that our fortune would change with the decision in 1996. The reversal has shocked us,'' Henry said.
Henry said his family was still interested in bringing home what he described was a replica of the Golden Buddha now in the custody of the regional trial court here.
The statue was already ordered released by Judge Antonio Reyes in May 1996 to Henry and his uncle, Jose Roxas, in trust for the estate of Rogelio.
Despite Reyes's order, the controversial statue remained with the court since Henry and Jose had been at odds after Jose, a locksmith from Olongapo City, dismissed all tales on the Golden Buddha as a hoax.
''I would like to take the statue home. But this does not mean that I am renouncing what my father really found. Since the Golden Buddha is no longer around, the statue in court would serve as a remembrance of my father's treasure hunting days.''
In fact, Ms Marcos's admission that came out in an aborted series of articles in the Inquirer last year, has ruffled anew bitter memories of the heirs of Buddha finder Rogelio Roxas.
''The statue could have been melted and perhaps formed into bars,'' Henry Roxas, Rogelio's eldest son, told the Inquirer. ''We could not help but think that part of the Marcos wealth came from the Buddha.''
In April 1971, government soldiers swooped down on Roxas's house at Aurora Hill in Baguio and forcibly took the Golden Buddha, which the treasure hunter said he found in a tunnel near the Baguio General Hospital.
The statue, which Rogelio described as made of pure gold with precious gems stuffed in its hollow torso, has never been seen since.
Marcos denied having a hand in the statue's disappearance but the locksmith-turned-treasure hunter had always claimed the men who seized the Buddha were acting on orders of the former strongman.
Roxas died under mysterious circumstances in 1993, a few years after Golden Buddha Corp. based in Atlanta, Georgia, was formed.
The company was supposed to continue Roxas's legal claims over the statue against the estate of the Marcoses, who were then forced into exile in Hawaii after a people's uprising in 1986.
Henry Roxas said the Golden Buddha weighed one ton. ''The statue was taken from our house together with the 17 gold bars. That's why with Imelda's revelations, we should not be blamed if we will believe that part of her claims actually came from my father.''
Marcos had been reported to have found gold treasures amassed by the Japanese Imperial Army headed by the late Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita during World War II.
''And so was the Buddha,'' Henry said. ''My father led an expedition to search for the statue after a Japanese oldtimer tipped him of the statue's whereabouts.''
Last month, Ms Marcos admitted to the Inquirer that her husband successfully increased his gold hoard from 1,000 to 4,000 tons in the 1970s.
She said her husband used their wealth to build roads, bridges, hospitals and schools for the benefit of the majority of Filipinos.
Too fantastic
Many people scoffed at the volume of gold Ms Marcos and her husband had, saying the claim was too fantastic.
Henry said he also believed that. But he insisted the Marcoses really had gold and part of it should be owned by the Roxas family.
He rued the Hawaii Supreme Court ruling that reversed a decision of the Hawaii district court awarding $22 billion in damages to GBC in 1996. The Hawaii district court ruling was considered one of the largest damage awards in history.
In a decision in November last year, the Hawaii Supreme Court found the evidence against the Marcoses too speculative to support Roxas's claim of discovering the fabled statue and its seizure from him in 1971.
''We were hoping that our fortune would change with the decision in 1996. The reversal has shocked us,'' Henry said.
Henry said his family was still interested in bringing home what he described was a replica of the Golden Buddha now in the custody of the regional trial court here.
The statue was already ordered released by Judge Antonio Reyes in May 1996 to Henry and his uncle, Jose Roxas, in trust for the estate of Rogelio.
Despite Reyes's order, the controversial statue remained with the court since Henry and Jose had been at odds after Jose, a locksmith from Olongapo City, dismissed all tales on the Golden Buddha as a hoax.
''I would like to take the statue home. But this does not mean that I am renouncing what my father really found. Since the Golden Buddha is no longer around, the statue in court would serve as a remembrance of my father's treasure hunting days.''
DAVAO CITY--A former Catholic priest here claims to have evidence that the alleged Marcos gold horde is composed of World War II ''Yamashita gold and Vatican gold.'' Ex-priest Marcelino Tagle of Bataan, a former director of Caritas Manila and one of the nation's ''Ten Outstanding Young Men'' in 1967, said in a recent interview that the nation ''should benefit'' from the Marcos gold, which he estimated at ''10 trillion dollars.'' Ten trillion dollars is 10 times more than the gross national product of China in 1998; around 127 times more than the GNP of the Philippines last year; and almost 10 times the combined worth of the world's 200 richest known billionaires in 1999. ''I am ready to substantiate and defend my claims for the benefit of the Filipino people,'' Tagle said when told that his claims were preposterous. The former priest said he once served as an adviser of the late President Ferdinand Marcos and administrator for the estate of another man whom he claimed was the source of the Marcos gold. But because Marcos was allegedly able to gain control of the gold certificates and cover the paper trail, according to Tagle, ''it is almost impossible to recover them without piecing the various pieces like a mosaic.'' Tagle said the gold certificates and bullion were deposited in at least 15 countries. How the Vatican and Yamashita treasure reached the Philippines is a story that, he claims, involves two of the century's most influential personalities--Adolf Hitler and Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Royal gold Tagle said the Vatican gold included ''gold bars captured by Hitler (which belonged) to the royalties of Europe of which the Vatican was the trustee.'' It also included ''royal gold'' which the British reportedly shipped to Singapore for safekeeping in the event that Hitler would conquer all of Europe. Tagle said the Vatican entrusted the treasure to a certain Fr. Jose Antonio Diaz, who assumed several names when he moved to the Philippines. One of his aliases, according to Tagle, was ''Col. Severino Sto. Romana.'' Tagle said Sto. Romana hired the young Marcos as his lawyer and trustee. He said the Sto. Romana gold was ''actually more than the Marcos gold, about $50 trillion, but this treasure is tied up with the Marcos gold.'' Tagle, co-administrator of the Sto. Romana estates, said the Yamashita treasure was recovered through the help of MacArthur and Yamashita's wife. But an estimated 400,000 metric tons from both the Marcos and Sto. Romana gold, he said, ''are still in the country, hidden in caves.'' For lack of documents The heirs of Sto. Romana were unable to recover the assets ''for lack of original documents and (because of the) nature of the accounts (which required) full cooperation of nominees and trustees constituted by the late President Marcos.'' Appearing before the Senate blue ribbon committee on Oct. 14, 1997, Tagle said Marcos, as lawyer and chief trustee of Sto. Romana, ''succeeded in isolating the nominees or trustees of the gold certificates from the physical assets--so much so that it is almost impossible to recover them without piecing the various pieces like a mosaic.'' Tagle said the ''Marcos gold'' was ''not stolen from the Philippine government.'' Instead, said the former priest, Marcos abused his authority by using the Central Bank to transact the gold. Tagle, who is presently in Davao City as consultant of gold prospectors, said he was ready to substantiate his claims. He allegedly went into exile in the United States in September 1969 because the Marcoses were displeased about his leading a protest against graft and corruption in the Bureau of Customs. He resigned from the priesthood and married. He is now chair and chief executive officer of International Consultex Inc., a New York-based mining, consultancy and engineering firm. A lot of money The Senate is conducting public hearings on the Marcos wealth, revolving around a $13.4-billion Swiss bank account once allegedly kept by Irene Marcos Araneta. Former Solicitor General Francisco Chavez is presenting the evidence. ''Chavez knows what he is talking about,'' said Tagle, adding that the Marcos wealth was so huge that even Marcos' widow Imelda did not know its exact worth. If Tagle's $10-trillion estimate of the Marcos wealth were true, the Marcoses would be around 111 times richer than ''the richest man in the world,'' Microsoft chief Bill Gates. Forbes Magazine in June estimated Gates' fortune at $90 billion. Ten trillion dollars is also 56 times more than the combined net worth of the top 50 billionaires in Asia, and almost 1,111 times the combined net worth of four Filipino billionaires who made it to the 1999 list. The Marcos family was not on that list. The amount is also equivalent to almost half of the combined GNP of the world's top 10 economies in 1998. It would take approximately 4500 people--counting uninterrupted at a rate of one dollar per second--70 years to count $10 trillion. | Seven-point solution
Tagle said among the first things government should do to recover the wealth is to abolish the Presidential Commission on Good Government which has spent ''millions of dollars'' but has ''failed to produce the desirable results in bringing back the gold assets for the benefit of the Filipino people.'' Tagle proposed a ''seven-point solution'' to the problem of recovering the Marcos wealth: Create a Global Trust Fund to ''secure, recover and distribute the assets of Marcos in an out-of-court settlement.'' Have ''banking groups lend money to the Trust using the gold certificates and physical assets deposited in the lending banks, for a period of 15-20 years.'' The proceeds should be used to ''pay the Philippine debt'' and to fund ''education, social services, medical needs, and generate jobs by building new plants, roads, transport facilities, communication, irrigation, energy development, etc.'' Probate courts ''should assist in determining the rightful heirs and beneficiaries (of the wealth) and effect compromise agreements with primary and secondary beneficiaries.'' Government and all beneficiaries should ''agree on their respective'' shares. ''Adequate compensation should be given to human rights victims.'' ''Put a major portion of the funds into the development of Mindanao and other depressed areas of the Philippines by creating new centers of industrial development and free trading zones.'' ''Establish an Asia-Pacific gold trading house in Subic backed up by a gold refinery, jointly operated by the Central Bank and private gold hallmark companies.'' ''Call a general and sectoral conference on the Marcos gold. World banking officials and lawyers involved in recovering the wealth must be invited.'' |
