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The odd search for Marcos' missing gold By ADI IGNATIUS November 8, 1999 Web posted at 11 a.m. Hong Kong time; November 7, 10 p.m. EDT True story. A year ago, a very personable Filipino walked into my office and offered me the chance to get seriously rich.
It turned out that this man (who will remain nameless) had purchased what he swore were rights to the fabled fortune of the late former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos. All he had to do was find it. (As for me, if I could help him, part of the loot would be mine.) Just another crackpot? Perhaps. But he certainly isn't the only person I know who has decided to devote his life to trying to recover the hidden Marcos treasure. An American friend is gambling his life savings pursuing leads in Hong Kong and the Philippines that he thinks will lead to the booty. Small wonder. If there's anything to the rumors, the late dictator's fortune isn't a normal one, like, say, $1 million or even $15 billion. Judging from press articles and the crankish accounts of the bounty-seekers who keep popping up in my office, we're talking about something more in the order of $50 billion trillion zillion shmillion. The gold, so the story goes, was hidden in the Philippines by the Japanese at the end of World War II. It's known as "Yamashita's Gold," after the general who controlled Japan's forces in the Philippines at the time. Marcos, they say, had it dug up and moved overseas. He apparently forgot to spend it, though, so it sits in vaults overseas, apparently just waiting for a lucky gold-chaser to find it and haul it all away. Last week in Honolulu, Filipino businessmen Enrique Zobel stirred the pot when he told investigators that Marcos once showed him a "thick folder" of gold deposit certificates that Zobel estimates were collectively worth more than $35 billion. All told, he said, Marcos stashed $100 billion overseas. Big numbers. But nothing compared with what I've seen. My Filipino friend possessed "evidence" -- several bank certificates of deposit; I still have a copy of one of them. The document purports to be an "obligation certificate," issued by the National Bank of Canada in 1989. The value: a crisp $427 billion. (How would you like that, Sir? All in billions?) There's no mention of Marcos anywhere on the certificate. The guarantee holder is "Mr. Kim LL Sung." "Isn't that North Korea's former leader?" I asked. "And why is his name spelled wrong?" My friend deflected my skepticism in the good-natured sincere manner of a true believer. Marcos put the money in fellow dictators' names for "safety," he explained. (Another comically huge deposit made out to former Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega; his name was also misspelled.) The names were botched, my friend elaborated, "because they have to do that for security reasons." Somewhere up there or down there or wherever he is, Ferdinand Marcos must be having a good laugh. According to what I've heard, he took the gold with him. Write to TIME at mail@web.timeasia.com Search for recent Asia Buzz
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