Ferdinand Marcos and his infamous wife Imelda were a fixture in international politics for decades, amassing extraordinary wealth like Imelda’s infamous shoe collection.
do not show this to your wife, girlfriend, sister, mother or daughter. THEY WILL GET IDEAS
Imelda famously didn’t want to purchase the Empire State Building because it was “too ostentatious”.
Just how much wealth does that equal?
The family and associates are estimated to have amassed more than $10bn (£6.1bn) in property, jewellery, cash and other assets during their time in power. Mrs Marcos, who was elected to the Philippine congress in 2010, has consistently denied embezzlement.
Since Ferdinand Marcos died in 1989, Imelda Marcos has made many attempts to re-enter public life, and at 85 is currently a successful politician in the Philippines.
Just recently, authorities seized artworks from Imelda Marcos’s properties, believed to be worth millions of dollars. Specific instructions were made to confiscate the following:
Femme Couchee VI (Reclining Woman VI) by Pablo Picasso
Portrait of the Marqueza de Sta. Cruz by Francisco de Goya
Still Life with Idol by Paul Gaugin
LaBaignade Au Grand Temps by Pierre Bonnard
Vase of Chrysanthemums by Bernard Buffet
Jardin de Kew pres de la Serre 1892 by Camille Pisarro
L’Aube by Joan Miro
Those are all extremely valuable pieces of art, but one may be worth more than the rest combined:
Madonna and Child by Michelangelo Bounarroti
Only eight paintings in the world have been confirmed to be Michelangelo originals.
well, that one’s on the roof of a chapel, so that takes the number down to 1 of 7 possible artworks she has
But the joke may be on the authorities of the Philippines, because a 1986 New York Times profile claims that the Michelangelo is fake, along with most of the artwork in her collection (except for the paintings listed above).
In fact, she even had copies of them, so she could have one in every property. So which one is real?
Eric Isidoro, a justice department official who searched the Marcos mansion, said his team seized at least 15 artworks, including three identical paintings of Michelangelo’s “Madonna and Child”.
“There were three of them but there is supposed to be only one. They could all be replicas or one could be genuine,” he told AFP.
Coked-up New York art dealers enjoyed selling to Imelda Marcos because she didn’t “have a great deal of acquaintance with the works she purchased”, according to one dealer, “[it] was a nice way to get rid of paintings you didn’t want”. Marcos was known for buying 50-80 paintings in one sitting, in one auction, through her agents, spending $4.61 million in one sale.
nsfw?
The best part?
She didn’t pay a dime in high NYC taxes:
In January, an employee of the Hammer Galleries was sent to Manila with a bill for $300,000 in New York City sales tax that the gallery said were owed on purchases, according to the dealer familiar with the Hammer sales. [Imelda’s assistant] Mrs. Tantaco, to whose private gallery in Manila the Hammer purchases were billed, refused to pay the sales tax, the dealer said. The bill was never paid.
Let’s see here:
- Own some priceless paintings for 30 years.
- Buy them cheap, don’t pay the taxes.
- Let the authorities come seize them.
- Let the authorities take what are most likely the fakes, have so many copies they can’t tell the difference
- …
- PROFIT???
