More than 70 billion pesos in what the government calls “ill-gotten” wealth linked to the Marcos family is still tied up in cases pending before the appellate courts, the head of the Presidential Commission on Good Government told a budget hearing.
PCGG Chairperson Melchor Sadang gave the figure on Monday during the budget hearing for the Department of Justice and its attached agencies before the House Committee on Appropriations. He said about 67 cases remained pending in the appellate courts, with a combined value of more than 70 billion pesos.
He was also candid about the limits of what the commission can still recover. In some cases, Sadang said, corporations named in the proceedings turned out to be unregistered or no longer operating, and witnesses were no longer available. Where the evidence has effectively evaporated, he said, the commission has had to tell the courts plainly that it is no longer presenting evidence.
That admission captures the core difficulty of these decades-old cases. The commission was created to recover assets allegedly amassed during the Marcos era, but time is not on its side: records go missing, companies dissolve, and witnesses die or become impossible to find. Legal claims can outlast the evidence needed to win them.
The result is a slow, partial reckoning. Tens of billions of pesos remain formally in dispute, but the practical question is how much of it can still be proven and recovered in court, a question that gets harder to answer with every year the cases stay open.