THE Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) began its research on President Joseph Estrada's wealth in the first quarter of 2000. By then, coffeeshops were already buzzing with talk of fancy mansions being built for presidential mistresses and of Estrada taking cuts from various business deals. While there were blind items in newspaper columns about these rumors, there were no serious attempts to investigate their veracity.

The President was then immensely popular and enjoying something of an uneasy honeymoon with the media. Smarting from critical reporting, Estrada had hit back at the press in the second half of 1999, by forcing the sale of the feisty Manila Times to his friend Mark Jimenez and then instigating an advertising boycott of the Philippine Daily Inquirer. For the most part, pliant press proprietors towed the Palace line as did broadcast media owners who were intimidated by a thin-skinned President who appeared to have no qualms about striking back at the media where it hurt—their pockets.

When we started investigating President Estrada's properties, we were not even certain whether the results of our research would be circulated through mainstream media outlets. The PCIJ is an independent, nonprofit news organization that is funded by grants and income from the sale of its articles and publications. While we publish a quarterly magazine and maintain a website, we rely mainly on newspapers and television networks to disseminate our work.

The crucial thing, it seemed to us, was to begin the research and then worry about its publication afterward. When a team composed of PCIJ staff journalists and contributors met in January 2000, we had only a sketchy idea of the dimensions of the President's wealth. Even as this book went to press in December 2000, we were convinced that we had only uncovered the tip of the iceberg. While we have documented the purchases of property and the formation of corporations, we have yet to report on where the money to fund these acquisitions came from. A definitive probe on Estrada's accumulations in his first two-and-a-half years in office has yet to be undertaken.

The direction of our research was determined by what could be documented. Thus, one track of our investigation focused on the acquisition of real estate and the construction of houses. The second track focused on the formation of corporations by members of President Estrada's various families. All these transactions, after all, require voluminous documentation and the filing of papers with various government agencies.

We were fortunate that in the Philippines, unlike other countries in Southeast Asia, access to many categories of public records is fairly routine. These include corporate registration and financial records, building and various permits, and statements of assets of public officials. These documents formed the backbone of our research and the basis for checking information provided by human sources.

But while access to these records was routine, it was also often made needlessly difficult by the foot-dragging of bureaucrats and the tedious procedures required to obtain documents. To get corporate registration records at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), for example, our researchers had to queue at the SEC office as early as 7 a.m.; the documents would be released only five or six hours later. Moreover, each researcher was allowed to access only three corporate records a day.

This became particularly time-consuming as our search using SEC computers yielded 66 corporations in which the President, his wives and various children were listed as incorporators, board members or substantial shareholders. It took us more than two months of lining up at the SEC office to obtain the records of these corporations. These documents became the basis of the report released by the PCIJ in July 2000, "Can the President Explain his Wealth?", which lists various Estrada holdings and shows the disparities between what the President declares in his statements of assets and income tax returns and what SEC records indicate as the rather substantial assets of his various families.