Ex-Imelda Marcos aide on trial in
NYC for selling Monet work
NEW YORK—A debt-ridden onetime aide to Imelda
Marcos wrongly sold a hidden treasure: a $32
million Monet painting the former Philippine first
lady had acquired and her country wants back,
prosecutors said Wednesday as the ex-assistant’s
conspiracy trial opened.
In a New York courtroom, Vilma Bautista is facing
charges that invoke the tangled history of Philippine
officials’ efforts to reclaim items from Marcos and
her late husband, former President Ferdinand
Marcos.
Bautista is accused of scheming to sell the artwork—
part of the French Impressionist’s famed “Water
Lilies” series—and trying to peddle other valuable
paintings that prosecutors say she had no right to
sell. The artwork vanished amid Ferdinand Marcos’
1986 ouster, ended up in Bautista’s hands and is
part of a multibillion-dollar roster of property the
Philippines claims the Marcoses acquired with the
nation’s cash, prosecutors said.
But for all the art-world intricacies and Philippine
politics, “at bottom, this case is really quite simple—
it’s about greed and fraud,” Manhattan Assistant
District Attorney Garrett Lynch told jurors in an
opening statement.
The defense said Bautista believed that Imelda Marcos
rightfully owned the paintings and that Bautista had authority
to sell them for her. Bautista is just an intermediary who got
caught up in a decades-long dispute between a nation and its
former leader, attorney Susan Hoffinger said.
“That battle doesn’t belong here” in a Manhattan criminal
courtroom, Hoffinger said in her opening.
After ruling the Philippines with an iron fist for two decades,
Ferdinand Marcos was forced by a “people power” revolt into
exile in Hawaii. He died three years later.
Philippine officials say Marcos and his associates looted the
country’s treasury to amass between $5 billion and $10
billion. The nation’s Presidential Commission on Good
Government has seized a number of companies, bank
accounts and other assets suspected of being part of that
wealth. The Marcoses denied their wealth was ill-gotten.
Unscathed
With a massive collection of shoes, Imelda Marcos became a
symbol of excess. But she has emerged relatively unscathed
from hundreds of legal cases against her and her late
husband, and she is now a congresswoman in the Philippines.
She’s not expected to testify at Bautista’s trial.
Bautista was a foreign service officer assigned to the
Philippine Mission to the United Nations and later served as
Imelda Marcos’ New York-based personal secretary.
By 2009, Bautista was deep in debt. She began looking to sell
four paintings the Marcoses had acquired during the
presidency—including Monet’s 1899 “Le Bassin aux
Nymphease,” also known as “Japanese Footbridge over the
Water-Lily Pond at Giverny,” prosecutors said.
Bautista ultimately sold the water lily painting for $32 million
to a Swiss buyer, Lynch said. Some proceeds went to
Bautista’s relatives and associates and to debts; $15 million
stayed in her bank accounts, while Imelda Marcos knew
nothing of the sale, the prosecutor said.
Bautista had a 1991 “certificate of authority” from Marcos to
sell the painting and receive the proceeds, the defense
emphasized; prosecutors question its legitimacy. At the time,
the work was not on the Philippines’ list of allegedly missing
paintings, though the government now seeks its return.
Bautista’s lawyer said the aide sold the painting for Marcos
but never had a chance to give her the money.— Jennifer Peltz
with David Thurber in Bangkok
http://globalnation.inquirer.net/88049/ex-imelda-marcos-aide-on-trial-in-nyc-for-selling-monet-work