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Posted: Sunday, 19 July 2009 8:14AM
Is Imelda Marcos hiding money in Kendall Co.?
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The Kendall County lawsuit stands out from the other complaints of ripoffs and traffic disputes for two very specific reasons:
First, the defendants are the former president of the Philippines and his shoe-hoarding wife.
Second, the plaintiffs are seeking part of $1,964,005,859.
In any county, that kind of litigation would stand out. And the idea that lawyers suspect former Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Imelda, may have invested in mostly rural Kendall County is almost surreal.
But there it is in black and white on the court documents: Survivors of Philippine torture as plaintiffs vs. defendant, the estate of Ferdinand Marcos.
The class-action lawsuit was filed in May, seeking some part of a nearly $2 billion estate.
What exactly are the lawyers after in Kendall County? That's not quite as clear.
Ferdinand Marcos was the 10th president of the Philippines. He and Imelda were famous — or infamous — for their glamour and controversy. When Ferdinand was barred by the constitution from running for a third term, he declared martial law and kept right on being president.
In all, Ferdinand Marcos ruled the southeast Asian islands from 1972 until he was ousted in 1986, during the People Power Revolution. Along the way, the couple was accused of embezzling billions of dollars and running a corrupt government.
After he was ousted, Ferdinand and Imelda fled to Hawaii. Imelda became famous around the world when 2,700 pairs of her shoes were found in the closets of the presidential mansion.
Ferdinand Marcos died in 1989. Imelda Marcos today lives in Manila, the capital of the Philippines.
In 1986, Philadelphia lawyer Robert Swift — one of the attorneys listed on the Kendall County lawsuit — filed a landmark human rights class-action suit on behalf the "citizens of the Philippines ... who were tortured, summarily executed or disappeared while in custody of the Philippine military or paramilitary groups." He won the case in 1992, when a jury found Ferdinand Marcos liable.
Three years later, the plaintiffs were awarded $1.9 billion in damages, the largest award in human rights history, according to the book "Inside a Class Action: The Holocaust and Swiss Banks" by Jane Schapiro.
Collecting the money was a different story. Over the past decade, Swift has filed lawsuits all over the country, pursuing Marcos' assets which he says are hidden with false companies, political cronies and obscured stock holdings.
In her book, author Schapiro describes Swift as a man obsessed.
"The case became a touchstone of his career," she wrote. "He talked about it constantly. Anyone who came in contact with him and had not yet heard of the class action could expect a lecture. His office, with its broad view of the city of Philadelphia, looked like a Marcos museum."
Which is how Swift ended up as co-counsel on the Kendall County lawsuit. The Kendall County portion of the litigation is being handled by Chicago attorney John Tangren.
"We filed because we think there may be assets in the names of other people," Swift said last week, when contacted about the Kendall lawsuit. "Basically, it's an asset chase to try to uncover evidence as to the ownership."
In the past, Swift has gone after bank accounts and property owned by the Marcoses.
"I pursued a number of different Marcos assets — we've sometimes been successful, sometimes not," Swift said.
Swift won't comment on what he's after in Kendall County and court records give no indication. Rather than talk about specifics, Swift offered an analogy to a case he had taken to court in Texas. In that case, Marcos had a political "crony" — Swift's word — invest in land outside Fort Worth. To buy the land, the crony set up 250 corporations under different names.
The land was not downtown real estate, but rather open land outside city limits, Swift said.
"If you have money that's sitting around, and you don't want to put it in the stock market, where do you put it?" Swift said. "People from agrarian societies ... tend to see land as very valuable."
Similar suits have been filed in Texas, Hawaii, New York and in Cook County in Illinois, according to Swift.
In past cases, Imelda Marcos has defended her claims to the money through lawyers. The Filipino government has put claims on the assets. The banks holding the assets also resist efforts to have the money redistributed.
"These cases tend to get defended to the hilt," Swift said.
So far, no lawyer for Marcos has shown up in the Kendall County courthouse. But if — at the next court date on July 31 — you see an 80-year-old woman in a really nice set of heels, that may have changed.
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Copyright 2009 STNG Wire, The Chicago Sun-Times. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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