The Marcos Corruption Scandal: A $25 Billion Flood Control Fraud and the London PR Firm Behind the Cover-Up

Welcome to Whale Hunting, where we follow the money behind some of the world’s most brazen financial crimes — and sometimes the image-scrubbing industry that makes them appear respectable. This week: the Philippines.

The Marcos family is one of the most notorious dynasties in modern Asian history. Ferdinand Marcos Sr. ruled the Philippines under martial law for fourteen years, during which time he and his wife Imelda looted an estimated $10 billion from the treasury — one of the largest cases of state plunder ever documented. When a popular uprising drove them from power in 1986, they fled to Hawaii. The money largely disappeared into Swiss bank accounts and New York real estate. The Philippines is still trying to recover it.

Last week, gunshots were fired inside the Philippine Senate as a former police chief barricaded himself against an International Criminal Court arrest warrant. The day before, the House of Representatives voted 255–26 to impeach the Vice President. The week before that, allies of the Duterte family staged a coup inside the Senate, electing a new Senate president with 13 votes — four of them senators linked to a $25 billion corruption scandal. The Philippines is in political meltdown. At the center of it is the son of the man who stole the $10 billion: Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the current president.

In April 2022 — one month before Marcos won the presidency in a landslide — a London political communications firm called Project Associates sent him a confidential proposal, Whale Hunting can exclusively reveal. The fee: $144,000 a month. The job: manage the international narrative around the son of kleptocracy.

The proposal promised to rehabilitate his image with Western governments and media, but it is not going to plan. Marcos is now running an anti-corruption drive that has accidentally produced the most documented corruption scandal in Philippine history. His first cousin Martin Romualdez — the former Speaker of the House who controls the national budget — has been charged as the alleged mastermind of a $960 million kickback scheme. But the corporate records, the offshore property trail, and a confidential document trail might tell a different story about who the real beneficiary was...

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