THE P203 billion which presidential candidate Isko Moreno
Domagoso and retired justice Antonio Carpio have been alleging
are "unpaid estate taxes" the Marcoses owe government will go down in
our political and media history as one of the most preposterous lies to have
ever been given some attention. Thanks of course again to the virulent
anti-Marcos Philippine Daily Inquirer and Rappler — the only two
media outfits that've been screaming over it.
This "estate tax" brouhaha was concocted in a
desperate move to breathe some life into candidate Moreno's dying campaign; he
has gone to town to disseminate that cock and bull story. However, by spreading
the lie, Moreno has definitively demonstrated he is totally unfit to be
president: he is either so gullible to believe the yarn invented by the
ever-scheming Carpio or so unprincipled to spread something he himself knows is
a fallacy.
That this is a colossal fabrication is easily gleaned from the
fact that among the alleged Marcos assets on which the estate taxes were levied
include stocks in San Miguel Corp. and Manila Bulletin, and shares of
the late drug tycoon J.Y. Campos as well as such properties as Fort
Ilocandia, the Coconut Palace, and the sugar lands of Roberto S. Benedicto in
Negros. Why on earth would the Marcoses pay estate taxes on these?
 |
| (photo credit to owner) |
Yes, Mr. Dumb candidate, these "unpaid estate taxes"
include assets which the Presidential Commission on Good Government
(PCGG) had sequestered in the 1980s. Many of these were ordered by the courts
to be returned to their owners (in the San Miguel case, to Edgardo Cojuangco),
or which the owner had surrendered to government, which then auctioned shares
sold many decades ago.
The PCGG also disclosed in its letter that there was a
"verbal agreement" in 2003 between it and the BIR to
determine which among the properties the latter wanted to levy estate taxes on
were sequestered and which were not. The PCGG and the BIR never got around to
doing that chore, understandably as there were 300 lots and over 200
companies/shares in corporations the latter had levied estate taxes on.
Inheritance
tax
I would think no matter how dumb you are, you have to understand
that "estate taxes" are different from "real estate" taxes.
Indeed, much of the traction of this preposterous lie is because Domagoso and
Carpio have exploited the fact that many people confuse real estate taxes
("amilyar" in Filipino) with estate taxes (no Filipino translation).
To avoid such confusion, I will instead use the term inheritance tax instead of
estate tax, which are synonymous under Philippine law.
You own a piece of land, and you don't pay the taxes on these, called "real estate" taxes. You'll be losing that lot when government garnishes it and sells it to pay for the amilyar. Contrast this to an estate tax. Your granduncle dies, you inherit his property (not necessarily real property but shares of stocks for example) which the BIR says is worth P10 million. But you don't have the P2 million (20 percent of the property's value) to pay the inheritance tax that needs to be paid on it for it to be transferred to you. Thanks but no thanks, you tell the BIR, shove it.
If Domagoso and Carpio are right in their reading of the
Internal Revenue Code, I would have to warn my cousin who's been living in
Canada since the 1980s never to visit. He has an uncle who died five years ago
here and he is the sole heir of his properties, but since he's a tech
millionaire there, he's been too busy to come here to work on the papers to
claim the property, and he doesn't care about it. Some lawyer like Carpio may
have asked the BIR to compute the inheritance tax and finding that he hasn't
paid for it, will ask a court to jail him, as Carpio demanded Marcos in his
case. (With Domagaso's obviously poor understanding of real estate taxes, the Manila
government should check if the right property taxes were levied on his P1.4
billion sale of the Divisoria Market, reportedly to an obscure Tondo-based
businessman.)
With this, it should be clear that Carpio's P203 billion figure
of unpaid inheritance taxes is totally a figment of his depraved mind. He
imagined that the BIR had demanded payment of a P23 billion tax deficiency in
1990, which he computed, as a result of interest rates and penalties, amounts
to P203 billion today.
He can't admit in his mind that the P23 billion figure is
entirely a hypothetical one, which the BIR claims the Marcoses would have to
pay if those alleged assets are turned over to them. But the Marcoses have not
acquired those assets at all, either because they are still sequestered,
returned to their real legitimate owners (such as Cojuangco), or sold off.
There may be assets that are in their control now, but the BIR had not informed
them 35 years ago or today, how much inheritance taxes they should have paid on
them.
Indeed, that the P23 billion figure is merely a hypothetical
inheritance tax estimate is the reason why for 35 years since that assessment
was issued, five BIR commissioners and five administrations (including two
Yellow ones, Fidel Ramos and Benigno Aquino 3rd) had paid no attention to it.
Only Carpio out to impress the gullible Domagoso has been a crackpot enough to
raise this nonsensical issue.
Ruthless
This estate-taxes black propaganda pathetically intended to stop
Marcos, Jr. from winning the May elections reminds us how ruthless the Cory
regime was in its campaign to totally crush the Marcoses.
In its plot to ensure that the strongman's death in September
1989 would also mean his total political extinction, which she thought would
happen if his heirs were left with nothing, Aquino's BIR scrambled to demand in
June 1990 the payment of the inheritance taxes on the Marcos estate, which the
BIR computed to be P23 billion, a figure deliberately concocted to be so big
his heirs would not be able to afford this.
Whatever assets the strongman could have left to them as their
inheritance would be confiscated for their failure to pay the inheritance
taxes. How did BIR come up with that huge figure?
The maximum rate for the computation of estate taxes at that
time was 20 percent of the value of the assets. To be sure that the estate
taxes would be huge, and after all since it only had a small staff to sniff
around what assets the strongman left, the BIR simply used the list of assets
the PCGG had sequestered at that time, which the Cory regime had been using to
create the myth of Marcos' massive kleptocracy, bloated to include even
properties of businessmen simply because they were known to be close to the
strongman and his wife Imelda.
Sequestrations
The BIR then used the figure the PCGG had been disseminating as
the total value of strongman Marcos' wealth when he died. Thus the 20 percent
estate tax was calculated on the assumed value of the assets that the PCGG had
ordered sequestered, which was P115 billion, or the ballpark figure for the
"hundreds of billions" in Marcos' alleged "ill-gotten
wealth" the Cory regime had been bandying about. In its rush to demand an
inheritance tax on Marcos' properties, the BIR threw in every property it could
think of which they heard from friends' friends were allegedly owned by Marcos.
There was another motive for the Cory regime to require the P23
billion inheritance tax. It became worried its sequestration would be
challenged in the courts, which could rule that such confiscations were illegal
or that the PCGG could not prove that they were acquired through corruption.
This in fact was what happened in so many cases, epitomized by the return of
San Miguel and coconut-levy firms to Edgardo Cojuangco.
If that happened, Cory's lawyers assured her, the Marcoses won't
have access to those assets on which the inheritance taxes were imposed, as
they had not paid the P23 billion inheritance tax plus penalties.
It turned out though that that scheme was too stupid that no
government lawyer had raised this issue to stop the lifting of a sequestration
on a particular property. How could for instance Hacienda de Fuego which was in
the BIR list, be shown to owe inheritance taxes when that list didn't impute a
value to it, with the total P23 billion figure being simply an
"estimate" of the total value of the 500 assets.
What a waste of our time this issue which Domagoso raised has
been.
The
Manila Times
March 30, 2022
BE YOUR OWN BOSS! Join
the most trending Online Negosyo now.
For only 17,888 you
can have 5 online shops of various food, health and beauty products, plus Ninja
Ion and Coppermask.
Reserve your slots
now. Send a message by clicking the button below.
Ask me how, leave me a message in https://www.facebook.com/siomai.online0212/
What can you say about this?
Share us your thoughts by simply
leaving on the comment section below. For more news updates, feel free to visit
our site often.
Stay updated with today's relevant
news and trends by hitting the LIKE button.
Thanks for dropping by and reading
this post.
Report from The Manila Times
Disclaimer: Contributed articles does not
reflect the view of THE PH
CHRONICLES. This website cannot guarantee the legitimacy of some of
the information contributed to us. You may do additional research if you find
some information doubtful. No part of this article maybe reproduced
without permission from this website.
0 Comments