“Tonight, I say to the Russian oligarchs and the
corrupt leaders who bilked billions of dollars off this violent regime: no more.”
(Excerpted from the US President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address)
In his address, the United States Department of
Justice, Biden announced, is assembling a task force that will be joining its
European allies to go after the crimes of the Russian oligarchs -- to find and
seize their yachts, their luxury apartments, their private jets -- their ill-gotten wealth.
RUSSIAN OLIGARCHS’ WEALTH
Russian oligarchs are businessmen who have accumulated
wealth – due to their close connections to organized crime -- during the
Russian privatization after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Vladimir Putin struck
a deal with the subdued oligarchs: stay silent and stay wealthy. Otherwise, one
speaking up about Putin regime’s high-level corruption – like Mikhael
Khodorkovsky, deemed the wealthiest Russian then – would find himself behind
bars. As the old Chinese idiom goes: kill the chicken to scare the monkey. Casey
Michel in his Intelligencer’s article said, “The message was impossible to
miss.” The now “poor” Khodorkovsky was used as a warning sample for the rest of
the oligarchs which reminds me of Senator Leila de Lima’s unjust detention.
Staying silent and staying wealthy, Russia’s richest
500 oligarchs, have amassed, Hudson Institute’s Nate Sibley reported combined
assets of $640 billion in 2020 – representing less than 0.001% of the
population – and have controlled more wealth than held by 99.8% of the adult population.
“And what do they do with all that money?” Sibley
asked. “Invest in new business and create jobs? Of course not. More than half
of the wealth…has been spirited away into tax havens and Western financial
centers.”
Employing western financial secrecy tools to keep much
of their ownership secret, Michel reported that “the oligarchs took their
wealth and transformed it into whatever they wanted, from mansions to yachts to
artwork to entire soccer clubs.” Rhetorically, he popped the question: “Who
wouldn’t choose a manor on the French Riviera or an estate outside London over
a Siberian prison?”
Reminds me of “Imeldific.”
Spencer Woodman of International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) wrote that “money doesn’t just move and hide. The flight of Russia’s wealth has been supported by big banks and global industry of professionals who specialize in providing rich clients with shell companies, trusts, and other secretive vehicles.” ICIJ has worked to unveil both the true owners of such secretive vehicles and also the professionals who underpin them, but Western countries have largely turned a blind eye to the people and companies that keep the system of the ill-gotten wealth running.
MARCOS’ LOOT
No wonder, the Presidential Commission on Good
Government, a quasi-judicial government agency with the primary mandate to
recover the ill-gotten wealth accumulated by Marcos Sr., his immediate family,
relatives, subordinates, and close associates, after more than three decades of
diligent work that had eventually recovered P174 Billion, so far, still has P125
Billion chunk of loot to retrieve.
“I don’t know what happened that the previous
governments were not able to recover the amount, and why the official assigned
have allowed the delaying tactics to happen,” Presidential candidate Leody De
Guzman wondered in the local dialect.
It’s not a user-friendly job, Sir. It’s a hard nut to
crack, as hard as cracking the secretive fortress of the Western financial
centers where the Russian oligarchs have been stashing away their ill-gotten
wealth. Curiously, the Marcoses and those Russian oligarchs are like two peas
in a pod.
Looking back to the last days of the Marcoses on the
Philippine soil, the U.S. government under the Reagan administration was
figuring out what to do with Marcos Sr. Excerpts from Sandra Burton’s book
“Impossible Dream: The Marcoses, The Aquinos, and the Unfinished Revolution”
were a fair narrative of that last fateful days of Marcos regime.
February 25, 1986.
“After conferring with [US President Reagan], Senator
Laxalt called Marcos back… The senator told him that power-sharing would be
impractical and undignified. He repeated the president’s invitation to the
Marcoses to move to the U.S. His considerable reserves of determination and
defiance now practically depleted, Marcos turned to Laxalt for advice. What
should he do? He asked. Laxalt put it to him straight.
“I think you should cut and cut cleanly. I think the
time has come.”
As if in sync, a Bloomberg article on Marcos loot butted
in and picked up quick-wittedly the narrative from that “Aloha” moment as
excerpted below.
“The following day, Marcos and 90 members of his
entourage boarded a U.S. Air Force C-141 transport plane and flew to Hawaii.
According to reports in the Guardian and the Washington Post, they carried with
them some essential belongings, including $7million in cash and gems (some of
which were transported in diaper boxes) 70 pairs of jewel-laden cuff links, and
enough clothes to fill 67 racks. There were also 24 bars of solid gold,
engraved: ‘To my husband on our 24th anniversary.’ But this
represented a mere fraction of their assets.
“The brazenness of Ferdinand Marcos’s graft – a haul
the Philippine government later estimated at $5 billion to $ 10 billion – would
become legendary, recognized by the Guinness World Records as the ‘greatest
robbery of a government’.” It would also set off what was arguably the most
ambitious geopolitical treasure hunt of all time, as investigators and lawyers
scrambled to track down the fortune.”
MASTER KEY. TEMPLATE
Statements and releases from the Biden administration have
spelled out the task force assembled: having expertise in enforcing laws
regarding sanctions, export controls, corruption, asset forfeiture, money
laundering, and taxes, it will go after the Russian oligarchs’ crimes joined by
the US Justice Department prosecutors and investigators. The task force will
work with the I.R.S., the F.B.I., the Marshals Service, the Secret Service, the
Department of Homeland Security, and the Postal Inspection Service.
These wrongdoings -- evading anti-money laundering
laws, hiding identities from financial institutions, and using cryptocurrencies
in evading sanctions and laundering money -- will be the targets by the Justice
Department using civil and criminal asset forfeitures.
Sad to say, the task force formation appears too
little too late for the besieged Ukraine. Yet, it will afford the Philippines
the rare opportunity in harnessing such trailblazing task force as a master key
(or a template for PH to piggyback) in unlocking the vault – a labyrinthine network
of secretive tax havens and guarded financial centers -- where the remaining
loot of the Marcoses has been stashed away from the Filipino people for more
than three decades.
A blessing in disguise. Just in time.
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