‘I’m a pauper compared to other pols’

Vice Presidential candidate Bongbong Marcos  INQUIRER FILE PHOTO / JILSON SECKLER TIU

Compared to other politicians, Sen. Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. said he considered himself poor.

Marcos, in an Inquirer.net live interview on Wednesday, didn’t answer immediately when asked where his wealth came from.

The namesake of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos then said that he knew a lot of wealthy people.

“And I’m nowhere near the kind of what they have. So it’s really hard to say,” he said, when asked if he considered himself wealthy.

Marcos, who with his family has been accused of continuing to hide ill-gotten wealth from the days his father was in power, said he was “better off than most Filipinos.”

“Where does my money come from? We are a very modern couple, my wife and I. She makes the money, I spend it,” he said, laughing.

He then admitted that questions remained about his family’s wealth.

“There are other things that we have regained, that belonged to me specifically, over the years. And over the years we were able to get back because they had been the subject of court cases,” he added.

  Less than half recovered

Professional estimates of the amount the Marcoses amassed during their total 20-year reign over the country and people peaked at $10 billion. Of that, less than 50 percent has been recovered.

Marcos Jr. is on record as contesting the seizure of the assets from his family.

In the interview, he said most of his money came from the work he and his wife had done in the “past few years.”

“We’ve been lucky, being able to recover some of the assets that were mine to begin with,” he said, without going into detail.

“In a political setting, I’m a pauper compared to some of the other… there are some vice presidential candidates that are spending P15 million a day,” he said.

During the hour-long interview, Marcos talked about his candidacy and platform, and his life as the son of the late president.

He reiterated that he considered the Marcos name an asset, although it had “built-in opposition.” But he pointed out that every candidate had his opposition.

 ‘Can we still come back?’

As for his experiences after his father was ousted, he said “I remember very clearly in the plane taking off and we couldn’t resist anymore because we were in their custody, I remember clearly asking my ninong, Danding Cojuangco, who was sitting next to me, ‘When do you think we’ll be coming back, if we can still come back?’”

His own eldest son, Ferdinand Alexander, or Sandro, who joined the interview, said he could not relate to his father’s experience at the time.

“Obviously that is part of our history that can’t be avoided. My dad has spoken to me about it a few times,” he told Inquirer.net. “I can’t even begin, me or my brothers, couldn’t even begin to relate, what he experienced, what he went through, the emotions that ran through the course of all those years.”

Asked what he thought of the accusations against his father, “It’s too much,” Sandro said.

“By having that amount of politically driven action within the administration, you block, you waste the energy, you waste the time, you block the opportunity for further progression,” he said.  With a report from Yuji Vincent Gonzales