NEW YORK -- A posh seven-bedroom Fifth Avenue condominium once owned by Imelda Marcos will be sold by the Philippine government for more than $3.6 million, a spokeswoman said Saturday.
The luxury apartment, located on the 43rd floor of Olympic Tower, would become the first of several New York properties once controlled by exiled Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife to be sold by the government.
The selling price for the apartment was $3.675 million, said May Vidallon, staff officer for the Presidential Commission on Good Government, the Philippine panel trying to recover Marcos' assets.
Proceeds from the sale of the apartment will benefit the government now headed by President Corazon Aquino, who was swept into office in a popular revolt three years ago.
The Aquino government has been trying to recover an estimated $3 billion to $10 billion in money and property it says the Marcoses purloined during their two-decade reign in the Philippines.
The buyer was described as a corporation identified only as Olympic Fifth Avenue, Vidallon said.
Closing on the building was scheduled for Monday morning, she said.
Marcos and his wife, now living in exile in Hawaii, have been indicted in New York on federal racketeering charges.
They are accused of defrauding U.S. banks of $165 million by refinancing U.S. properties purchased with $103 million plundered from the Philippine treasury.
The Philippine government reportedly also has agreed to sell four Manhattan buildings formerly controlled by the Marcoses worth an estimated $400 million. That agreement was expected to be signed by the end of February.
The $3.675 million culled from Monday's sale of the opulent seven-bedroom condo will be used in the Philippine Agrarian Reform Program to buy land for landless peasants, the commission spokeswoman said.
The apartment has been on the market since July. It was purchased in 1976 for $668,000 by offshore companies controlled by Imelda Marcos, she said.
The apartment was handed over to the goverment as part of a 1987 settlement of lawsuits. The settlement also gave the government title to the 26-room Lindenmere estate on New York's Long Island and a $2 million six-bedroom house in Hawaii.
The contents of the Fifth Avenue condo, including a Fontaine-Latour painting that sold for $400,000, were auctioned at Christie's last year.
A house in New Jersey used by the Marcoses' daughter during her years as a student at Princeton University was sold in 1987 for $1 million.
