A glimpse of a possible Picasso in the home of Imelda Marcos filmed during a visit by her son after his presidential election win has set off a flurry of speculation in the Philippines, where the family that once plundered billions is set to return to power.
Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr, the son and namesake of the late dictator, won a landslide victory in Monday’s presidential election, an outcome that has appalled those who survived his father’s regime.
Images released by the family showed Marcos Jr visiting the home of his mother, who had displayed Picasso’s Femme Couche VI (Reclining Woman VI), or a replica, above a sofa.
Photo: Reuters
It is unclear if the painting, one of eight targeted for seizure by anti-corruption authorities in 2014, is genuine, but the unexpected appearance of the nude in blues and greens reclining on an orange and yellow bed has added to the fears that the family would use its now-increased power to brazenly further stifle efforts to recover ill-gotten wealth.
Marcos Sr presided over rife human rights abuses during his 20-year rule as president, including the arrest, torture and killings of his opponent, and used his power to plunder as much as US$10 billion until he was deposed in 1986.
The family squirreled away the funds in overseas bank accounts and real estate, while Imelda Marcos, the dynasty’s matriarch, splashed out on an infamous shoe collection, jewelry, art and designer clothes.
The family and its backers have since rebranded the Marcos name, with disinformation about Marcos Sr’s rule spread widely online.
Ruben Carranza, a former commissioner for the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG), which was set up to investigate and recover ill-gotten wealth, said it was unclear if the painting was genuine.
“Mrs Marcos has had a habit of buying fake paintings, as well as lending fake paintings for display,” Carranza said.
However, he said: “The fact that she’s now displaying it just shows not just the duplicity of Mrs Marcos, but that she has to display the duplicity and the extravagance that she thinks she’s displaying for Filipinos to see... That says something even worse.”
“It shows this really, absolutely uncaring attitude for Filipinos. They’ve not only now been led to believe that [the Marcoses] have gold. Now, they’re leading them to believe, again, that they have so much wealth that they can just display it whenever they please,” Carranza said.
For years, there has been speculation online that the Marcoses have huge sums of gold, which was given to Marcos Sr by a wealthy family as payment for acting as their lawyer. According to the story, the gold would be shared with the people if the family regained power.
Marcos Jr has either downplayed or denied the abuses that occurred in the Philippines under his father. As president, he would have the power to appoint the commissioners of the PCGG, granting him huge influence over the body that was set up to recover the family’s ill-gotten wealth.
The PCGG has reportedly retrieved about US$5 billion, while a further US$2.4 billion was bogged down in litigation, and more remains missing, reports have said.
The Picasso was supposed to have been seized by the government in 2014, but former PCGG commissioner Andres Bautista told the Rappler news site that she believed the item was a fake.
“Personally I know that what we seized was a fake. It was a tarpaulin so it’s still with them,” he told the site.
The Marcos family continues to face dozens of court cases over their plundered wealth. Imelda is appealing against a 2018 criminal conviction on seven corruption charges.
Marcos Jr’s spokesperson, Atty Vic Rodriguez, did not respond when asked during a news conference to clarify whether the artwork on display in the Marcos home was genuine.
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
ISSUE: Some foreigners seek women to give birth to their children in Cambodia, and the 13 women were charged with contravening a law banning commercial surrogacy Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday thanked Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni for granting a royal pardon last year to 13 Filipino women who were convicted of illegally serving as surrogate mothers in the Southeast Asian kingdom. Marcos expressed his gratitude in a meeting with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet, who was visiting Manila for talks on expanding trade, agricultural, tourism, cultural and security relations. The Philippines and Cambodia belong to the 10-nation ASEAN, a regional bloc that promotes economic integration but is divided on other issues, including countries whose security alignments is with the US or China. Marcos has strengthened