RECYCLABLOG 4: Disiniland: Welcome to the Magic!

Kleptocracy: government by those who seek chiefly status and personal gain at the expense of the governed.

Did you know that this word was introduced to the English language because of the Marcoses?  

The Marcoses are in the Guinness Book of Records as the biggest thieves in modern world history and journalists at the time of his ouster could not describe in a single word, the manner by which the Marcoses systematically looted the country. They also inspired and unfortunately for us, inculcated a brand of economics that plagues us until today: crony capitalism. Here is just a sample of Marcosian kleptocracy and crony capitalism. The aftershocks, in the instituted corruption and debts for onerous business deals made at the time of his regime, we still feel today.

Don’t look for Mickey Mouse in this place, but you may find a rat or two. There is no Space Mountain nor Star Tour either, but an entire country was taken for one big ride. And maybe you don’t get a photo-op infront of the Cinderella Castle, but you can marvel at its biggest attraction:  a colossal white elephant that rises on a cliff and overlooks the South China Sea, the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant.  Welcome to Disiniland!

Herminio Disini was a frequent golfing buddy of Ferdinand Marcos whose wife was a cousin of Imelda’s and a former governess of the First Couple’s three children. This distinction was pixie dust to Herminio Disini as he magically transformed a small-time business of making cigarette filters into a conglomerate empire of 33 separate enterprises: the Herdis Group of Companies, with assets totalling over $200 million (pre-devaluation) in a span of just six years. His best wheeling and dealing trick of course, was the Westinghouse deal for the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant. Westinghouse hired Disini as their SSR (Special Sales representative: well, really, a prettier way of saying “grease-man”) to sell the nuclear power plant project to Marcos. The nuclear power plant was actually Marcos’s knee-jerk reaction to the energy crisis in the early ‘70s. A panel appointed by Marcos and the head of the Philippine National Power Corporation recommended purchase of a General Electric reactor. But Marcos overruled the panel’s choice in favor of the much more expensive reactor from Westinghouse. Westinghouse, through Disini, submitted a four-page “proposal” letter to Marcos and made a brief presentation to the president and his cabinet. GE, meanwhile, had submitted an extensive, three-volume proposal (well obviously, pick the one that’s easier to read!). The original contract price with Westinghouse was $500 million for 2 reactors but after construction began, this ballooned to $ 2.8 BILLION for ONE reactor. Well, the ingredients were all too familiar: a multi-million dollar government project, a foreign contractor, a juicy commission, an arrogant president and a bagman. The last two skimmed off a reported $80 million in commissions (again pre-devaluation so let’s put it at around $480 million adjusted for inflation).  But that wasn’t all. Many of Disini’s other companies bagged a multitude of contracts from this mother deal. Among these, an exclusive Westinghouse distributorship contract with Asia Industries, a company of the Herdis Group; a contract with one of Disini’s small construction firms to be the chief contractor for building the nuclear reactor, even if the company had no experience in nuclear reactor construction; and an insurance policy on the nuclear plant worth $688 million, the largest ever written in the Philippines (My, My! Hermi come on down! You’re the biggest winner in “The Price is Right!”). From the very start, the project was mired in controversy. Westinghouse and Marcos had to deflect concerns about the safety of the plant which was sited five miles from the foot of Pinatubo (geez!) and  in the middle of the Pacific “fire rim” earthquake zone of high seismic activity. The Philippine Atomic Energy Commission initially refused to give a construction permit, although Marcos had already began construction anyway. The Commission’s head, Librado Ibe, eventually issued the permit after much wining and dining by Westinghouse plus intense pressure from Energy Minister Geronimo Velasco. It was signed just a week after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania after which Commissioner Ibe promptly moved to the U.S. (presumably nowhere near Pennsylvania).

The nuclear power plant was completed in 1984. Marcos was overthrown and the Aquino government mothballed the power plant after a team of international nuclear experts declared it unsafe to operate. The Philippines finally paid off its debt to the project with a final payment of $15 million dollars made April 2007.The Bataan Nuclear Power Plant never produced a single watt of electricity.  Herminio Disini left the country two years before Marcos was ousted. He bought a castle in Vienna. He has a pending case in the Sandiganbayan  for bribery. Philippine officials cannot find him. Repeat after me: We will now learn after our monumental mistakes, we will now learn,…oops, we did it again.

Source: http://indiosbravos.blog.com/2011/04/17/recyclablog-4-disiniland-welcome-to-the-magic/

RECYCLABLOG #3: Marcos Sex Files: Matilda Waltzes with the Dictator

Does the name Evelin Hegyesi ring a bell? If it does, that means you probably have an archive of Playboy magazines dating back to the 70′s. Evelin Hegyesi is a former Sydney model who once graced the pages of Playboy and modeled mink bikinis. She also once stole the heart of Ferdinand Marcos (pre-Dovie Beams). The two are said to have met while she was working as a model in Paris in 1970. She was at a fashion show and was introduced to president Marcos and “struck an immediate rapport”. Hegyesi thereafter would frequent Manila, trysting with Apo Ferdie at a “safehouse” somewhere in Forbes. She then got pregnant and gave birth to a daughter on April 1971. 

A Marcos lovechild? Well, her daughter’s name is Analisa Josefa (pic on the right with partner Dean Fleming). Josefa is the name of Marcos’s mother. Curiously also, when Swiss authorities lifted their notorious bank secrecy laws, international investigators found an “Australian” link to one of Marcos’s secret accounts. Soon after Evelin Hegyesi gave birth in 1971, Marcos signed papers that made Ms Hegyesi’s company, Austraphil Pty Ltd, the “sole and only beneficiary” of one of his fronts, the Azio Foundation. Hegyesi set up Austraphil on October 14, 1970 when she was just 23 years old and three months pregnant. Money was regularly transferred from this Marcos account to the accounts of Evelin Hegyesi only terminating when Marcos died in 1989. 

In February 1993, Evelin took her daughter to Manila to meet the Marcos lawyers and tried to persuade them the pair were entitled to $20 million from the estate. They travelled with Joe Phillips, a financial consultant Evelin had hired to help claim the money from the Marcos estate. The Hegyesis and Mr Phillips met the Marcos family lawyer Manuel Lazaro early in February, 1993. Several of Marcos’s generals were at the meeting. Mr Lazaro told them he accepted Analisa was the daughter of Marcos, but there was no provision for them in Marcos’s will. The meeting was friendly and the three were invited to dinner at Mr Lazaro’s home. Though Evelin and Analisa returned home empty-handed, the two still lead a very posh life. Evelin is now a 57-year old real estate multi-millionaire (thanks to that seed money and sustento from d’ Apo) and Analisa is a socialite living with the son of a racing and fruits market family with an estimated worth of $270 million.

Source: http://indiosbravos.blog.com/2011/04/16/recyclablog-3-marcos-sex-files-matilda-waltzes-with-the-dictator/

RECYCLABLOG # 2:My Big Fat Greek Accomplice

On March 9, 1986, a Greek national boarding a plane for Hong Kong was stopped by customs officials when they found the man carrying a suspicious package of 8 large padded envelopes. The officials asked him to open the envelopes and they found pieces of expensive jewelry in each one of them. When questioned about the ownership of the precious stones, the Greek national admitted they belonged to Imelda Marcos and they were to be collected by a jeweler friend of Imelda’s in Hong Kong. The Greek passenger’s name: Demetrios Roumeliotes and the seized jewels were to be known as the famous Roumeliotes collection, the most valuable and magnificent of Imelda’s jewelry.

The seized items were boarded onto armoured cars and whisked off to the Central Bank. In August, the government invited world renowned art and jewelry dealer Christie’s to appraise the collection. The Christie’s team was headed by then head of jewelry sales, Rusell Fogarty and international director chairman Francois Curiel. Together with representatives of the PCGG   and customs officials, they carefully inspected the “loot” of 60 pieces of jewelry and some loose stones. According to a witness (the appraisal was not made known to the public at that time), there were audible gasps as each item was taken out of their packet. Among the items that bedazzled the appraisers were a Persian- style necklace with over 100 carats of yellow and pinkish diamonds of various sizes, shapes and cuts; a 93 carat diamond necklace by Italian jeweller Buccelati (the Buccelati name has been known to the jewelry and silver world since the mid 18^th century!); a bracelet with a solitary marquise diamond of 30.56 carats that still had the price tag from Bulgari attached to it: the price $1 M; a pair of combination diamond and emerald earrings of which the emeralds (3 carats each) from Van Cleef and Arpels were of such rare clarity, color and quality that the appraisers were dumfounded and could not put a price on them without further research. The diamond droplets were 3 carats each.

The rest of the stash sparkled with an array of brooches, necklaces and earrings made of diamonds, rubys and emeralds the size of coins, ranging from 3, 7, 15, 82 to a hundred carats each (just for perspective: ordinary blokes like us who get our wives jewelry will sweat it out for a .25 or 1 carat piece in a downtown mall—and we’re not talking of “pure” cuts). Christie’s never made public their appraisal of the jewelry but estimates from the PCGG range from 4.7 to 5 million dollars at the time. The Roumeliotes collection was only one of several seized from the Marcoses when they fled. Of course Imelda denied owning the Roumeliotes collection even claiming that they were not real but made of paste. More than a decade later, sometime during his presidential term, Joseph Estrada ordered two Customs officers to meet Imelda at her Makati condo. He gave them specific instructions to accommodate her because “she only wants a few pieces (of jewelry) back, those that have sentimental value for her.” Soon afterwards, one of the two officers was named deputy collector, with a promise of further promotion to Customs deputy commissioner had Estrada not been ousted. So if you happen to bump into Imelda at shop 168 in Divisoria and see her sporting a pair of emerald droplet earrings, tell her to swap them for those kitschy costume jewelry pieces from one of the stalls, anyway hers is just made of  “paste”.

Source: http://indiosbravos.blog.com/2011/04/13/recyclablog-2my-big-fat-greek-accomplice/