Judge Manuel Real: Back on the Hot Seat Again

[WSJ Law Blog]

Strange things are afoot once again in the chambers of the embattled Los Angeles federal judge Manuel Real. The latest: Judge Real is being asked by a group of Filipino claimants for an accounting of funds seized in litigation concerning the Philippines late dictator Ferdinand Marcos. According to the LA Times, at least $5 million is unaccounted for; and possibly “ten times that much” could be missing. Click here and here for a lead story and a follow-up from the LAT; click here and here for earlier LB posts on the ongoing problems with Judge Real, who, last year, was booted from three cases in four months for allegedly ignoring evidence and a host of other reasons.

Lawyers for a handful of Filipino groups jockeying for the money last month filed a request with the Ninth Circuit to make Judge Real provide a more detailed accounting the funds. The request was released publicly on Wednesday.

The backstory: In a 1995 trial, Real awarded $1.9 billion to several plaintiffs, including 10,000 Filipinos, who had sued Ferdinand Marcos for human-rights abuses. The claimants later sought to settle the judgment by seizing a portion of Marcos’s funds that had been frozen in a Merrill Lynch account by a New York federal judge in 1987. In 2000, after a variety of appeals, Judge Real was entrusted with $35.3 million as U.S. courts wrestled over who should get the money.
Subsequent litigation in the matter reached the U.S. Supreme Court last year, which ruled that the adjudication of the matter belonged in the Filipino court system. At that point, Real was ordered to return the account to Merrill Lynch. Since then, according to the LAT, Real has met with lawyers for all sides three times but provided only a single page of unspecified receipts and payments. In only two outlays mentioned over the decade he controlled the account, Real reported $63,398 for “trustee fees” and more than $4.9 million for “other disbursements.”

In their petition, lawyers for Merrill Lynch and the Philippine National Bank told the appeals court they needed a full accounting, partly to learn “for what purpose(s) a substantial portion of the assets apparently were disbursed while in the custody of the district court.”

When Real’s chambers were contacted by the LAT, his clerk, William Horrell, reportedly said, rather memorably, that Real “doesn’t comment on things.”