Numbers game

The second impeachment hearing before the House Committee on Justice last Wednesday did not have the same immediate drama as Ramil Madriaga’s testimony the week before. There were no bombshell quotes about bags of cash being moved in a matter of hours. But if the first hearing gave the public a jolt, this second one may actually have been more damaging.

Because this time, the story was told not so much by witnesses but by documents. With numbers and figures on paper. Official records of the Ombudsman, the Anti -Money Laundering Council (AMLC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission painted a picture that was colder, more methodical and much harder to wave away.

Take the Vice President’s SALNs. Records presented at the hearing showed that from 2019 to 2024, Sara Duterte declared zero balance for cash on hand and cash in bank. Zero. Not low. Not modest. Nada. For six straight years.

That in itself already strains belief. A public official, a national figure, a member of one of the country’s most powerful political families, with absolutely no cash on hand and no cash in the bank for six years? Come on.

That claim is so ridiculous that VP Sara’s lawyers immediately attempted to walk it back by saying her cash accounts were lumped with her miscellaneous assets under the heading “others.” This “explanation,” however, simply replaced the absurdity of claiming zero cash balances with the absurdity of a career elective official not knowing how to accomplish a SALN form properly. Go figure.

Now place that next to the AMLC records presented at the hearing. Those records reportedly showed billions of pesos in transactions moving through accounts owned by the Vice President.

At that point, the issue was no longer just inadvertence. It became an apparent misrepresentation. Put more plainly, unless she has a very clear and convincing explanation, it is beginning to look like she lied under oath when she executed her SALNs.

And the numbers do not stop there.

The hearing also brought out the fact that some P6.7 billion in covered transactions were flagged by the AMLC over accounts owned by Sara Duterte and her husband. That figure sits very awkwardly beside the much more modest net worth she declared in her SALNs.

Again, nobody is saying that transaction volume is automatically equal to net worth. But that is not the point. The point is that these figures raise glaring questions about the truthfulness and completeness of what she officially declared under oath.

And in this country, that is not some technical footnote. We have already seen how false or incomplete SALNs can destroy careers at the highest level. One Chief Justice was impeached over it. Another was removed outright.

Then there was the Trillanes angle.

Former Senator Sonny Trillanes, whose earlier claims about Duterte’s family bank accounts were dismissed as political theater, saw key portions of his allegations validated by the AMLC records.

Among the most explosive revelations was the existence of a joint account held by Sara Duterte and her father containing over P2 billion. Trillanes also pointed to several checks amounting to millions of pesos allegedly deposited by Sammy Uy, an alleged drug lord, into this joint account and into accounts of other Duterte family members.

If true, that is not just a story of possible corruption. It is a story of staggering hypocrisy.

The reaction from the Duterte propaganda machine has been telling. Instead of squarely denying the AMLC findings, their trolls and talking heads have gone into overdrive trying to spin the line that these are only “movements” and not actual balances. But that misses the point entirely.

If billions were moving through her accounts while she was declaring zero cash for six years, where exactly did those billions come from? And if those transaction figures supposedly do not reflect her real bank balances, then why not simply disclose what those balances actually are?

Instead of endless spin, she should let the numbers speak for themselves. Unless, of course, those numbers tell a damning story of massive corruption.

I guess we’ll see at the Senate trial.