Vice President Sara Duterte — Photo from Inday Sara Duterte/Facebook
MANILA, Philippines — After completing its first clarificatory hearing on Vice President Sara Duterte’s alleged misuse of P612.5 million in confidential funds and bribery, the House committee on justice will turn its attention to her alleged unexplained wealth at its next hearing on April 22.
Tuesday’s hearing brought together several resource persons, including self-confessed bagman Ramil Madriaga, his notary public, and representatives from the Commission on Audit (COA), House records, Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), and the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI).
READ: VP’s husband seeks TRO on subpoena for tax records
The committee dedicated most of the hearing to submitting and reviewing evidence cited in the impeachment complaints. Among the findings presented included:
- Madriaga’s detailed accounts of his engagements with the Dutertes
- NBI’s finding that some acknowledgment receipts for confidential funds were written by a single person
- COA’s notices of disallowance on the Office of the Vice President’s (OVP) utilization of confidential funds from 2022 to 2023
- PSA’s report that many of the alleged beneficiaries’ names have no corresponding birth, death, or marriage records.
House justice committee chair Batangas Rep. Gerville Luistro said at a press conference Tuesday night that the next hearing will focus on Duterte’s Statements of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth (SALN) furnished by the Ombudsman, alongside corporate and tax records from the SEC and BIR.
“We intend to focus for the next hearing on the allegations of unexplained wealth and that is why the Ombudsman, the SEC and the BIR were not asked in today’s hearing,” she said on Tuesday.
The committee has also granted motions to subpoena the Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) and former Sen. Antonio “Sonny” Trillanes to testify on allegedly anomalous or suspicious bank transactions from 2006 to 2025.
This paves the way for the panel to fully examine the charge that Duterte accumulated wealth disproportionate to her lawful earnings as a public official.
“Part of the hearing is the discussion of unexplained wealth and SALN issues. So in the next hearing, the SALN of the Vice President will be mentioned, as well as their [income tax return] submissions, and their bank transactions if anything is found by the AMLC. And of course, lastly, the details concerning former Sen. Sonny Trillanes,” said Bicol Saro Party-list Rep. Terry Ridon, chair of the House committee on public accounts.
Ridon explained to reporters that the committee limited its subpoena to flagged bank transactions of Duterte and her husband, Manases Carpio, because the unexplained wealth allegation is anchored on the vice president’s SALN. Extending the subpoena to other members of Duterte’s family, he said, would not be necessary.
“The reason why it’s limited to Mans Carpio and Vice President Duterte [is] simply because when you build the forensics analysis there, it should only be limited to them both because the net worth in the SALN should be based only on the wealth of these two parties,” he said at Tuesday night’s press conference.
The impeachment complaints specifically accuse Duterte of having deposited at least P111 million across various banks in Davao City and Metro Manila from 2006 to 2015. This was an amount complainants found grossly disproportionate to her salary as former vice mayor and mayor of Davao City.
Her net worth also allegedly ballooned from P13.8 million in 2007 to P44.8 million in 2017, despite having an estimated annual salary of only P2 million. /das
