The late President Ferdinand Marcos Sr. did not establish the Asian Development Bank (ADB), contrary to a claim made in a YouTube video.
Public records do not attribute the bank’s creation to a single individual or nation. The regional bank was conceived at the 1963 Ministerial Conference on Asian Economic Cooperation held by the United Nations Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (UN ECAFE). In 1966, UN ECAFE member nations agreed to put up the bank’s headquarters in Manila.
YouTube user PweDelie TV, however, posted a video May 22 claiming Marcos founded the bank. Its title reads:
GRABE IBINUNYAG NA! SI DATING PANGULONG FERDINAND E. MARCOS ANG NAGTATAG NG ASIAN DEVELOPMENT BANK
(JUST IN! FORMER PRESIDENT FERDINAND E. MARCOS ESTABLISHED THE ASIAN DEVELOPMENT BANK)
The video consisted of intercut footage from an ADB reception on the same day for President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. at the bank’s headquarters in Mandaluyong City. Other than the title, the condensed video and the original event livestream made no mention of the elder Marcos as ADB founder.
In support of the false claim, the video showed a letter at the 0:43 mark intending to establish connections between the Philippines and the World Bank. The document credited USD 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (300 duodecillion) to an offshore account under several European banks.
The document, “RE-CONFIRMATION OF TRUST DEPOSIT IN TRUST TO 9 WORLD BANK AND 7 IMF-EL BANCO ESPANOL OFFSHORE CAPITAL DE TVM,” displayed the seal of the Office of the President and was supposedly signed at Malacañang Palace on Oct. 4, 1976 when Marcos Sr. was still president.
The Official Gazette does not contain a record of such a transaction.
In addition, the video erroneously cited three of the six individuals who allegedly signed the document.
T. Page Nelson, who was identified as the Foreign Currency Director of the U.S. Department of Treasury, retired in 1974.
Preston Martin, cited as the vice chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, would not take up the position until 1982.
Gaston Egmont Thorn only served as president of the yearly UN General Assembly for its 30th session in November 1975.
As of press time, the PweDelie TV video has garnered 40,607 views, 1,500 likes and 161 comments. The channel was created on Apr. 12, 2015 for “entertainment buff(s),” according to its profile description.
PweDelie TV has been fact-checked by Rappler, VERA Files and News5 among others for false claims about the Marcos family’s gold deposits. (KG)