Before the Philippines held a mid-term vote dominated by a bitter feud between President Ferdinand Marcos and his impeached vice president Sara Duterte, documents circulated online alleging to show several bank accounts belonging to Marcos’s late father as part of a US$10 billion money laundering scheme. However, an AFP analysis found the banks mentioned in the documents do not exist.
“The Marcos family, who appears out of it in most occasions, has been exposed! Involved in a $100B money laundering?” reads a Tagalog-language Facebook post published May 2, 2025.
It was shared by the page Boldyakan, which used to support Marcos Jr but later became one of the president’s fiercest critics.
The post links to an April 29 report of alleged documents revealing bank accounts belonging to the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr — the current president’s father.
According to the report, the Marcoses used “large-scale gold transactions in Hong Kong as a cover to be suspected (sic) of conducting large-scale money laundering activities” amounting to more than US$10 billion.
It goes on to claim a whistleblower submitted the supposed documents to the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) on April 14.
The allegations circulated ahead of the Philippine mid-term polls on May 12, which were seen as a referendum on the current administration (archived link).
Only six out of 11 Marcos-endorsed candidates secured a Senate seat, joining 12 others already in office as jurors at embattled Vice President Duterte’s impeachment trial, which could see the Marcos rival permanently barred from public office (archived link).
The narrative — previously debunked by the collaborative Philippine fact-checking project Tsek.ph — also spread on TikTok, Weibo and Douyin, as well as in publications such as the Hong Kong-based Bastille Post, Taiwanese Meihua Media and Phoenix Television (archived link).
Marcos matriarch Imelda claimed in 2013 that the family held around 6,000 to 7,000 tons of gold, although Marcos Jr denied its existence in 2022 (archived links here and here).
The Philippine Supreme Court previously ordered the Marcoses to hand back over US$658 million found in their Swiss bank accounts — a fraction of the $10 billion estimated to have been plundered from state coffers during the regime (archived link).
While AFP cannot independently verify the Marcos family’s alleged possession of secret gold accounts, the online documents list banks that do not exist.
Read the full story on AFP Fact Check.