Plunder

The accumulation of wealth through public office on a scale that changes the character of the act. Ordinary graft skims a transaction. Plunder takes the treasury.

The course uses the word in the sense the Philippine recovery effort uses it, and states the figure the way the recovery effort states it: five to ten billion United States dollars, attributed to Jovito Salonga and the PCGG, built from a documentary trail. Higher figures exist and are named as estimates rather than promoted to findings. The range is not a weakness in the scholarship. It is a fact about a regime that kept its own books.

Source: Jovito R. Salonga, Presidential Plunder: The Quest for the Marcos Ill-Gotten Wealth, 2000, library, the origin of the US$5 to 10 billion figure and the basis of the Guinness World Records entry. Citation chain compiled at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ill-gotten_wealth_of_the_Marcos_family . The outer estimates, US$13.145 billion as a minimum and US$30 billion floated, belong to Bernardo Villegas and Jesus Estanislao, and a figure of around US$10 billion was given to a United States House committee by Ambassador Stephen Bosworth in 1985.

First used in: 1.7 · When the state itself became the looter