Article II starts: Unexplained wealth charge, P6.77-B record at Duterte trial

MANILA, Philippines — Vice President Sara Duterte's trial is set to shift to the paper trail behind her alleged unexplained wealth, covered under Article II of her four impeachment charges.

House prosecutors are expected to begin presenting evidence for allegations that her assets and financial interests do not square with her lawful income and official wealth declarations.

The Senate impeachment court is set to resume at 10 a.m. on Monday, September 14 with the unexplained wealth charge, after prosecutors last week ended their presentation of witnesses for the confidential funds article.

Bank, tax, corporate and other financial records obtained through subpoenas from the impeachment court will be tackled. Considered a smoking gun is the Anti-Money Laundering Council report covering billions of pesos in transactions involving Duterte and her husband, lawyer Manases Carpio.

More than 1,800 documents, including bank and insurance records, were set aside for marking last week in preparation for Article II.

Rep. Chel Diokno (Akbayan party-list), one of the prosecutors handling the article, has also served Duterte's defense with 104 requests for admission aimed at establishing the authenticity of financial records and ownership of bank accounts without requiring witnesses to authenticate each document.

But the prosecution will ultimately have to establish more than the movement of large sums through bank accounts.

The AMLC told the House justice committee in April that banks had filed 630 covered transaction reports and 33 suspicious transaction reports involving Duterte and Carpio from 2006 to 2025, with the transactions totaling P6.77 billion.

Of the total, P3.77 billion was attributed to Duterte and P2.99 billion to Carpio.

AMLC figures presented during the House proceedings put roughly P4.4 billion in inflows and P1.5 billion in outflows, while about P791 million could not be classified as either.

The P6.77-billion figure is an aggregate of transactions recorded over nearly two decades. It does not mean Duterte and Carpio held P6.77 billion at any one time, nor does the figure by itself establish unexplained wealth.

Covered transaction reports are generated when transactions meet statutory reporting thresholds and do not necessarily indicate suspicious activity. Suspicious transaction reports, by contrast, involve transactions flagged by covered institutions based on circumstances defined under anti-money laundering laws.

The prosecution will therefore have to connect the financial activity in the records to Duterte's declared assets, lawful sources of income and business interests.

During the House impeachment proceedings, lawmakers focused on what they described as a mismatch between Duterte's bank activity and her Statements of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth.

Records submitted by the Office of the Ombudsman showed that Duterte declared no cash on hand or bank deposits from 2019 to 2024, while her declared net worth increased from P55.6 million to P88.5 million during the same period.

Duterte has disputed the prosecution's interpretation of the records.

Defense lawyer Michael Poa previously stressed that the AMLC figures represent aggregated deposits, withdrawals and other transactions over many years and should not be treated as the amount of money Duterte and Carpio possessed.

Poa has also said Duterte's cash was included under the "others" category of her SALN rather than separately declared as cash on hand or in banks.

Duterte has maintained that she declared her assets and money in her SALNs and that her wealth came from legitimate and documented sources.

The impeachment court in July ordered the production of peso-denominated bank records, AMLC reports and relevant tax records involving Duterte, Carpio and entities linked to them after finding the requested documents prima facie relevant to Article II.

Presiding officer Sen. Francis Escudero, however, imposed a significant limitation on historical records from 2007 to 2021: they may be used only as a comparative financial baseline for Duterte's current term and not to establish separate impeachable offenses from earlier periods.

The prosecution has asked the impeachment court to subpoena retired Sandiganbayan justice Amparo Cabotaje-Tang, Office of the Ombudsman records officer Karen Batu and Securities and Exchange Commission official Gerard Del Rosario as witnesses for Article II.

Prosecutors said Cabotaje-Tang would testify on principles governing public accountability, unexplained wealth and prohibited business interests.

Batu is expected to identify and authenticate SALNs and other relevant Ombudsman records, while Del Rosario is expected to authenticate corporate records involving ownership, positions and business interests.

Officials from the AMLC, Bureau of Internal Revenue, banks and other institutions are also among the potential witnesses as prosecutors build the documentary chain behind the financial records.

The prosecution has said it is considering around 25 witnesses for Article II, although the number could be reduced if the defense admits the authenticity or ownership of documents covered by its requests for admission.

The impeachment court gave Duterte's lawyers 15 days to respond to the 104 requests.

Monday begins another three-day stretch of morning impeachment sessions from September 14 to 16, followed by a regular plenary session.

On Wednesday, the court is also expected to hear four amici curiae, or friends of the court, on a separate issue that could determine the threshold for conviction: how the constitutional two-thirds requirement should be computed when some senator-judges are unable to participate.

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