Following the People Power Revolution that ended two decades of Ferdinand Marcos's rule in late February 1986, President Corazon Aquino's government pressed forward in mid-March with efforts to recover billions of dollars believed hidden by Marcos and his associates in foreign banks and shell companies, launching one of the largest asset-recovery campaigns in modern history.
Ferdinand Marcos had ruled the Philippines for twenty years, first as an elected president and then, after declaring martial law in 1972, as an authoritarian strongman who jailed opponents and rigged elections while he and his wife Imelda amassed staggering personal wealth. When millions of Filipinos flooded Manila's streets during the February 1986 People Power Revolution, Marcos and his family fled to Hawaii aboard US Air Force planes, leaving behind palaces stuffed with evidence of plunder — including Imelda's now-infamous collection of over a thousand pairs of shoes.
Corazon Aquino, widow of assassinated opposition leader Benigno Aquino Jr., assumed the presidency and moved quickly to claw back what investigators estimated could be five to ten billion dollars siphoned from the Philippine treasury into Swiss bank accounts, New York real estate, and shell corporations worldwide. The Presidential Commission on Good Government was established to lead this hunt.
The recovery effort dragged on for decades, complicated by international banking secrecy and the deaths of key witnesses, and by the time of Marcos's death in exile in 1989, only a fraction of the alleged fortune had been recovered. The case remains one of history's most extensive — and only partially successful — efforts to reclaim wealth stolen by a deposed dictator.