MikeLigalig.com

UNLESS THE Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) moves faster than usual, the clan implicated in the Nov. 23, 2009 Maguindanao Massacre might soon retake control of what by all accounts is a scandalously vast estate of money and mansions, and wheels and weapons it had acquired while governing over a dirt-poor province.

Next week, on Dec. 2, a freeze order on 597 bank accounts, 142 firearms, 132 motor vehicles, and 113 houses and lots, recorded in the names of 27 Ampatuan family members and their associates, will lapse.

The bank accounts alone are estimated to be worth more than a billion pesos ? multiple times more money than what the Ampatuans who held elective office had declared in their asset disclosure records to be their lawful incomes and net worth.