The family of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos invested in different European corporations after Swiss banks imposed stringent rules on accounts from dubious origin.

This is the reason why the Presidential Commission on Good government (PCGG), has difficulties in recovering the alleged ill-gotten wealth of the former dictator, said a Swiss lawyer who is helping PCGG.

The Marcoses have been able to maintain an extravagant lifestyle because they still have accounts stashed in different banks and corporations in Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg, Germany, England and France, said Dr. Sergio Salvioni, who came to Manila last week. "They [Marcoses] are still immensely rich," said Salvioni.

Over the past six months Salvioni said his team found 300 companies in Europe that have links with the Marcoses and their cronies. Like other families with dubious sources of wealth, the Marcos family resorted to the use of a parabanks system to hide their ill-gotten wealth, said Salvioni.

The parabanks is "a system of corporations which have more or less similar activities (like that of banks but) are not really banks. They have controls over the funds, but their controls cannot be found. They are finance corporations, lawyers, notaries, and trustees It is very difficult to have control of these people, and doubly difficult to make them reveal that they are managing ill gotten wealth," Salvioni said.

It should be easy for the Philippine government to recover the ill-gotten wealth because of the two landmark decisions of the Swiss Federal Supreme Court and the Philippine Supreme Court which declared the Marcos Swiss deposits as ill-gotten.