[ANALYSIS] Duterte impeachment trial Day 11: Prosecution regains momentum, the heat is back
The political temperature is again rising on Vice President Sara Duterte in the resumption of the impeachment trial on Monday, Aug. 3, as the prosecution takes the paper trail involving more than P600 million in confidential funds.
On the 11th day, the trial zeroed in more on accountability—on Duterte's possible liability in the use of public funds, apart and away from the theatrics of just taking her out of the horizon in the May 2028 elections.
Prosecution lawyer Lorna Kapunan succeeded in taking the trial into the paper trail, with the testimony of lawyer Roderick Wamil of the Commission on Audit, providing flesh to the otherwise prosaic testimonies of two former LandBank officials on Article I last week.
Through Wamil, Kapunan clearly established that the funds were “confidential funds” withdrawn from LandBank, as testified last July 29 by its two former officials—P500 million for the Office of the Vice President and some P112.5 million for the Department of Education when Duterte was still its chief beginning May 2022.
Confidential funds, according to Wamil, are defined, limited, and subject to compliance under a set of rules based on a joint circular of 2015 on confidential funds held by the COA, Department of Budget, Department of Interior and Local Government, and the Department of National Defense, among others.
Whether the OVP has indeed misused the funds or not, Kapunan and Wamil—hours into his testimony—laid questions, if not doubts, that it was indeed worth pounding Duterte to explain: How indeed did the VP spend P612.5 million in cash, the first P125 million in just 11 days?
Wamil is the third witness presented by the prosecution for Article I. He is a COA auditor assigned to the Intelligence and Confidential Funds Audit Office, or ICFAO.
Simply put, he audits all government offices that receive similar funds as provided for by the General Appropriations Act—from the Office of the President, Vice President, security agencies, down to the local government units.
The P612.5 million in confidential funds came from four checks of P112.5 million for the OVP (P500 million), and four checks of P37.5 million (P112.5 million) for the then-DepEd chief, beginning in the last quarter of 2022 to the third quarter of 2023.
COA has disallowed part of the funds, with the ICFAO issuing a notice of disallowance covering some P375 million in confidential funds, and another disallowance notice covering P73 million in CF expenditures for 2022, both for the OVP.
Based on the result of the direct examination, Wamil said the OVP was not exactly faithful, “or compliant” in the liquidation of funds, effectively suggesting impropriety in the use of the funds, according to Kapunan and Wamil.
Wamil raised some of his observations from the time the OVP liquidated its P125 million fund for the period covering Dec. 21 to Dec. 31, 2022, six months after Duterte occupied the office.
Why only Duterte? Because she was the only VP and DepEd secretary who received confidential funds in the period of 2014-2024.
Quoting the joint circular, Wamil said the OVP failed to comply with certain requirements of the joint circular—ranging from stating the financial plan for a confidential operation—and since payment of the rewards was made, presumably the operation was successful, the OVP must have but failed to explain a success or accomplishment report.
And for the first time, the name of “non-existent” Mary Grace Piattos, the most famous—or infamous—among the recipients of confidential funds, finally surfaced in the trial, but the prosecution managed to present an “acknowledgment receipt” showing that Piattos received only P70,000, not millions.
There were no questions about the specimen signatures of the Vice President and other officials in reports submitted to COA. Questions lay elsewhere: So many receipts for reward for liquidation report covering the period Dec. 21 to 31, 2022 were dated 2023. Wamil dutifully took note of the discrepancies, as if things were done in haste.
It left us wondering how the defense would handle the witness during the cross-examination—on the erroneous dates, for instance.
If the two witnesses from the NBI testifying on Article IV would be allowed for all their typographical errors in their affidavits and reports to the Department of Justice recommending the filing of charges against Duterte for three counts of grave threats and one count of inciting to sedition, must the OVP be allowed to get away with it?
Except that there were too many errors in the liquidation reports involving dates of receipts when the rewards were supposedly received. Such inconsistencies prompted other members of the prosecution panel to conclude deceit, if not misuse, of the confidential funds.
Kapunan was all set to lay down another set of reports the OVP submitted to COA involving liquidation for another quarter, but limited time prevented her from doing so. The presentation of more evidence as well as the direct examination of Wamil will push through on Tuesday, Aug. 3.
For a trial day so touchy, if not damaging, to the VP, Kapunan and defense counsel Michael Poa, as well as Wamil, were calm and restrained; there was no political drama.
What could have been a tedious, dramatic checking of voluminous COA documents was kept slow and minimal; the whole exercise appeared nothing more than clerical, ministerial.
After the trial, Poa told reporters the defense was ready to debunk Wamil’s testimony. He pointed out that Wamil was only testifying for the period he was still part of ICFAO, suggesting that the OVP and the DepEd could have settled with COA beyond his time all the questions raised against Duterte during the trial. This makes the next hearing worth watching.
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