Marcos’ N.J. Mansion Sold by Philippines for $1 Million

MANILA —  The Philippine government has sold a New Jersey mansion seized from former President Ferdinand E. Marcos for $1 million, government officials said Tuesday.

The officials said the mansion, in Lawrence Township, N.J., was sold to an unidentified American buyer who first had to prove he was neither directly nor indirectly connected with the former first family of the Philippines.

“It’s not a Marcos crony,” said Rafael Fernando, U.S. executive director of the Presidential Commission on Good Government, formed by President Corazon Aquino to recover Marcos’ foreign holdings. “We wanted to make sure it (the mansion) didn’t fall into Marcos’ hands again.”

Fernando, in Manila to meet with Aquino, said that the buyer had placed $100,000 in escrow in the United States as a down payment and that the $1 million from the sale would be turned over to the Philippine government next month.

The official Philippine News Agency said it was the first time a Marcos property had been sold to recover the former ruler’s foreign wealth, which the government claims he obtained by raiding the nation’s treasury.

Marcos and his family fled the country on Feb. 25, 1986, after a civilian-backed military uprising swept Aquino to power.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based legal group hired by the government to recover Marcos’ U.S. holdings, estimates that Marcos owned property worth about $1 billion in the United States and between $5 billion and $20 billion worldwide.

The news agency said Marcos bought the mansion early in the 1980s to be the home of his daughter, Imee, while she studied at nearby Princeton University, but a Philippine government official in New York said the mansion was bought by a Marcos intermediary in 1975.

A New Jersey Superior Court judge on Sept. 12, 1986, awarded the house and 13-acre estate, as well as bank accounts and other Marcos-linked liquid assets worth about $470,000, to the Aquino government.

Judge Paul Levy ruled that “the funds and the property rightfully belong to the Philippine government” because there was “hard evidence” the assets were purchased for Marcos with money siphoned from the Philippine treasury.

Fernando said the Philippine government had put the New Jersey mansion on the market with an asking price of $875,000 but had received two offers of at least $1 million.