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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(Email: juanlmercado@gmail.com)