Marcos ‘son’ gets 12 years for gold scam
NEW YORK–A swindler posing as former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos’s son has been sentenced to more than 12 years in prison for running a phony gold certificate scheme that cheated victims out of some $80 million.
Edilberto del Carmen, 41, a Filipino who had lived in California, Manhattan and Hong Kong, was sentenced to a prison term of 12 years and 7 months on Monday, prosecutors said on Tuesday.
He had pleaded guilty shortly after his trial began in Manhattan federal court in September. At the time, he claimed to be 60 years old, but prosecutors said that was also untrue.
Using his Marcos alias, del Carmen claimed that as the late dictator’s first-born son he inherited a large fortune, supposedly including billions of dollars in gold and over $5 trillion in US notes.
Ferdinand Marcos died in exile in Hawaii in 1989, more than three years after he was driven from his homeland.
Del Carmen, who said his funds were tied up in gold certificates, ran up more than $500,000 in debt, including a $200,000 bill at Hong Kong’s Hyatt Regency, where he had lived in the Presidential Suite.
He gave a bogus gold certificate, purportedly issued by the Union Bank of Switzerland, as collateral for his outstanding debt. The certificate said del Carmen owned about 3,500 metric tons of gold.
In April 2000 del Carmen met an undercover agent posing as a broker seeking assets for a Wall Street brokerage firm. During one meeting, del Carmen showed the agent a pair of gold dog tags he claimed gave him access to the Swiss bank’s vault, which housed the gold he supposedly owned.
Prosecutors said that among problems with del Carmen’s claims, one stood out. The bank vault was incapable of housing that much gold because its floor would collapse under such heavy weight.
-- Reuters |
