World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [82]
17 The exception is surely Cojuangco, descendant of a nineteenth-century Chinese immigrant and a remarkably talented, if pathologically corrupt, businessman, who is still one of the Philippines’ richest men.
As for the country’s predominantly ethnic Chinese business community, this group flourished under the Marcos dictatorship. One of Marcos’s first acts as autocrat was to enact a new constitution in 1973 facilitating access to Philippine citizenship for all Filipino Chinese who wanted it. This change in the law opened up a host of economic opportunities for the Chinese, many of whom shot to second- and third-tier tycoon status. There was of course a price: The Marcoses had to be paid off, constantly and handsomely. Imelda Marcos made herself a “silent partner” in every major corporation, almost all of which were owned by Filipino Chinese. At first she demanded a 10 percent equity interest in all businesses. Later she made it 25 percent. In addition, the Commissions of Customs would pay an annual visit to businessmen, typically Chinese, collecting $500,000 “birthday presents” for Imelda. If someone declined, his visa would suddenly be invalidated.
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Still, once the Chinese realized that the Marcoses wished only to redistribute wealth to themselves and not to the poor, the Chinese rejoiced and stock prices began steadily to climb. Despite the Marcos’s gouging, the market was basically intact, and the market-dominant Chinese were freer than they ever had been—a 10 percent levy is far better than outright confiscation—to make their fortunes.
Indeed, many Filipino Chinese who knew Marcos remain surprisingly loyal to him. He was an intelligent, in many ways simple, even ascetic man, they say, who ate a plain bowl of Chinese porridge every morning. Marcos was corrupted and ultimately destroyed, they insist, by Imelda, who by all accounts was stupid, ruthless, insatiably greedy, and driven by a terrible inferiority complex. (Among a long list of Imelda’s failures, she once dated the now-martyred Ninoy Aquino, but he dumped her for the shorter, far wealthier Cory.) “I cannot stand this woman,” Henry Kissinger once said of Imelda, despite her desperate attempts to court him.
Stupid or not, through her parasitic relationship with the entrepreneurial Chinese, not to mention extortion, bribery, and direct raiding of the public treasury, Imelda was declared “one of the ten richest women in the world” by Cosmopolitan magazine in 1975, her photograph appearing along with those of Queen Elizabeth of England and Christina Onassis Andreadis. On a one-day shopping spree in New York City, Imelda spent $2 million on jewelry. According to Bonner, “A platinum and emerald bracelet with diamonds from Bulgari alone cost $1,150,000. She also paid $330,000 for a necklace with a ruby, emeralds, and diamonds; $300,000 for a ring with heart-shaped emeralds, and diamonds; $78,000 for eighteen-carat gold ear clips with diamonds; $300,000 for a pendant with canary diamonds, rubies, and emeralds on a gold chain.”
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Imelda did not only have a large shoe-and-jewelry collection. She was also a minor art collector. Although her taste was not widely respected, she spent some $40 million on works (largely fakes, as it would turn out) from around the world. In addition, she had a small collection of private aircraft: She liked to travel with an entourage of four jets, sometimes one just for her luggage. She also collected real estate. In September 1981, Imelda bought the Crown Building on Fifth Avenue in New York for $51 million. Five months later she bought the Herald Center for $60 million.
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During this period the Filipino Chinese as a group grew wealthier too, although they remained at Imelda and Ferdinand’s mercy right