Partial redemption
Former Pangasinan Rep. Mark Cojuangco went ballistic on a TV talk show this week. Cojuangco flared at persistent criticisms over a Supreme Court award of 16.2 million San Miguel Corp. shares to his father, business tycoon Eduardo “Danding” Cojuangco.
“My father had a right to those shares,” Cojuangco asserted. Instead of being panned, he should be credited for, among other things, setting up a replanting program and “petrochemical plants to add value to the coconut.” Dear Ol’ Dad was then Ferdinand Marcos’ coconut czar.
Close association between Marcos and Cojuangco had not been proved, the high court ruled last April. This was essential to establish a case for ill-gotten wealth.
“The biggest joke to hit the century,” Justice Conchita Carpio-Morales snapped in her scathing dissent. Cojuangco’s SMC bonanza were bought from levies the Marcos dictatorship wrung from indigent coconut farmers, she said.
People Power I also banished the Cojuangcos to Hawaii. “The only time I was able to see President Marcos a lot was during our exile in Hawaii after Edsa 1986,” recalled Mark Cojuangco, whose admiring parents named him after Marcos.
“The dictionary definition of crony is buddy or pal of similar age,” he said. “My father is much much younger than Marcos… He respected Marcos as a leader. But to say he was a crony, dictated on by the President, malayo po yon.”
Not so, wrote Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno in her dissent on the SMC case. Sapped by the martial law levy, coconut farmers “in effect financed expansion of the business empire of Eduardo Cojuangco…. IIlicit acts were obscured by a corporate layering scheme.”
Four sets of evidence prove Cojuangco’s close association with Marcos, plus the behest nature of loans used to purchase SMC stocks:
1. Marcos appointed Cojuangco to head both the Philippine Coconut Authority and United Coconut Planters Bank. Through these positions, buttressed by a series of “tailored” executive issuances by Marcos, Cojuangco “employed a scheme of corporate layering and multi-level loan transactions to divert public funds.”
How? Coco levy funds were deposited interest-free at UCPB “which administered them as it pleased.” As UCPB president, Cojuangco wrung “substantial loans used to purchase the SMC shares, directly in his name or indirectly through his dummy corporations… He used prima facie public funds (derived from the coco levy) in CIIF Oil Mills to snap up substantial amounts of SMC stocks.
Shell firms were established “for the sole reason of purchasing SMC shares.” These “fronts” parceled out “favorably obtained credit from UCPB to different entities.” There would be no paper trail leading to “a single natural person who had control and management of the bank.”
“These anomalous transactions were built on the sweat of coconut farmers. [They] left an indelible mark in the country’s history of recovering ill-gotten wealth” Sereno wrote. “The Court majority effectively impeded gains … to retrieve public funds misappropriated by Marcos cronies.”
2. Previous characterization of Cojuangco, by the Supreme Court no less, “affirms what has long been within the realm of public knowledge: that Cojuangco was a close associate of Marcos.”
The high court upheld a Court of Appeals decision that former Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office general manager Fernando Carrascoso Jr. rightly withheld Danding’s winnings in several horse races.
“There is no denying that plaintiff is a very close political and business associate of the former President,” the Supreme Court said. “Carrascoso could not be faulted in asking further instructions from the PCGG … on what to do with the prizes.”
“After approving a lower court’s judicial notice of what is accepted public knowledge, the Court … can no longer backpedal, a decade later, to deny close association between [Marcos and Cojuangco] for alleged lack of competent evidence,” Sereno wrote.
3. Two blocks of Bulletin Publishing Corp. shares—46,626 and 90,877—in the name of Eduardo Cojuangco were in fact “ill-gotten wealth” of the Marcoses, the Court ruled in Republic vs. Estate of Hans Menzi.
Cojuangco acted as “dummy, nominee or agent” of Ferdinand and Imelda Romualdez Marcos in acquiring Manila Bulletin shares. Proceeds from the sale of 198,052 Bulletin shares ( 90,866 of which were under the name of Jose Campos and 16,309 under the name of Cesar Zalamea ) were forfeited in favor of government.
4. In a controversy over a Falcon aircraft leased by Hong Kong Faysound Limited to a United Coconut Chemicals, two US District Courts concluded that Cojuangco was a “multimillionaire businessman, with substantial interest in UNICHEM, undoubtedly a close friend and adviser to Marcos.”
“Cojuangco does not, deny, nor is he ashamed of, his relationship with the late dictator. But he distances himself from Marcos’ greed… If crony capitalism of Marcos dictatorship is slowly erased from public memory . . . martial law revisionism will triumph in the future.”
“The lesson [to] be learned from the national trauma that was the rule of Marcos is, kleptocracy cannot pay,” Sereno wrote. A time may come “when the legal impediment presented before the Court today is lifted.” That could stem from newly discovered evidence or another justifiable reason.
The future may yet present an “opportunity to revisit the ruling of this Court—and Philippine history may have a chance to be redeemed in part,” Sereno concluded hopefully.
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