The legal laundromat has run its full cycle, and the inconvenient truth has come out clean. Since the previous administration, which maintained cordial ties with the Marcos family, dismissals of ill-gotten wealth cases have been quietly piling up.
At least nine cases against the Marcoses were dismissed by either the Sandiganbayan or the Supreme Court during that period alone, a pace that has only quickened since Ferdinand Marcos Jr. took the presidency.
The most recent and consequential development was the Sandiganbayan Special Division’s junking of the remaining claims in the decades-long landmark Civil Case 0141, in a resolution promulgated on 2 June, after the government literally waved the white flag before the anti-graft court.
The instrument of surrender was the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG).
The PCGG was created through Executive Order 1, the first official act signed by President Corazon Aquino immediately after the EDSA People Power Revolution ousted Ferdinand Marcos Sr. Its mandate was to recover the ill-gotten wealth of the Marcos family and their cronies.
On 12 May 2026, the government filed a manifestation stating that it would no longer present evidence “with respect to the remaining listed properties not covered by the partial judgments.” The court had no choice but to oblige.
The dropping of the claims against the Marcos family, which ran into billions of dollars, occurred through abandonment, as the PCGG, ostensibly the people’s lawyer in these cases, stopped fighting.
The PCGG, which was created to be a watchdog, transformed into a body whose sole task was to ensure that the Marcos cases were brought to a conclusion. The paradox was that the Marcos lawyers’ decades-long delaying tactics became a factor in the legal home run.
The prolonged resistance by the defense contributed to the case going stale as witnesses retired or died and records aged, making evidence harder to present and ultimately forcing the PCGG to drop further pursuit of the case. The court, to be fair, did grill the state lawyers on the delays in presenting evidence.
Thus, the result was the “lack of proper authentication” of the evidence presented by the prosecution, with most documents in the PCGG’s custody consisting of “mere photocopies,” “most of which were barely readable.”
The Sandiganbayan affirmed its dismissal of the forfeiture case involving the assets of the late Kokoy Romualdez, a brother of former first lady Imelda Marcos and uncle of the incumbent President, citing the inordinate delay, with only one justice dissenting.
Through partial judgments obtained between 2003 and 2019, the government had recovered approximately $678 million against the original estimate of the ill-gotten wealth running from $5 to $10 billion.
With Marcos Jr. constitutionally barred from seeking reelection, every dismissal before June 2028 permanently locks in impunity, since no successor administration can refile cases that have been formally terminated with finality.
The PCGG itself declared as early as August 2022 that it did not foresee any new cases being filed against the Marcoses, saying that no new evidence had surfaced in the last 15 to 20 years.
That statement read like a declaration of intent instead of an assessment.