‘One diamond could have bought two airports’ – the Filipino recreating Imelda Marcos’s gems stash

The mind-boggling hoard of jewellery the plundering first lady tried to smuggle out of the Philippines is being remade as sculpture by artist Pio Abad - with all its sparkle gone

Over his three terms as president of the Philippines from 1965, Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda were able to cream off some $10bn of the nation's assets through offshore banks. New revelations that a close associate of the dictator was also able to maintain an account with Credit Suisse as late as 2006 therefore comes as no surprise to Manila-born Pio Abad. For a decade the artist has been making work under the title The Collection of Jane Ryan and William Saunders, a reference to the aliases the couple used with the Swiss bank.

It's funny when a 10-year project becomes news," says Abad, who is now London-based. These institutions are very culpable for what happened in the Philippines."