The Anti-Money Laundering Council’s disclosure of P6.77 billion in flagged bank transactions linked to Vice President Sara Duterte and her husband, Atty. Manases Carpio, has fundamentally transformed the impeachment proceedings against her.

What began as a politically charged spectacle has evolved into something far more sobering: a document-driven reckoning with the question of whether one of the country’s highest officials accumulated wealth that her lawful income could never explain.

The AMLC findings are not rumor or innuendo. They are official records — 630 covered transactions and 33 suspicious ones spanning nearly two decades, reflecting a net inflow of roughly P2.88 billion into accounts connected to the Vice President and her husband.

For a public official who declared zero cash on hand or in any bank from 2019 to 2024, the arithmetic is brutally difficult to reconcile.

Carpio’s response to this exposure has been telling. Instead of issuing a categorical denial of the transactions — their existence, their accuracy, their sheer scale — he filed criminal complaints against AMLC officials and lawmakers for the manner of the disclosure.

It is a legal maneuver dressed up as righteous indignation. But as House Committee on Public Accounts Chair Rep. Terry Ridon correctly observed, a complaint about how records were revealed is not the same as disputing what those records show. The billions were not denied. Only the manner by which they were revealed is being contested.

This distinction matters enormously. When the defense shifts from “this is false” to “you had no right to say it,” the factual foundation of the impeachment grows stronger, not weaker.

And yet, for all the weight of the evidence, Filipinos must confront an uncomfortable truth: the impeachment process does not end in the House.

Once the case moves to the Senate sitting as an impeachment court, conviction requires 16 votes out of 24 senators — a two-thirds supermajority in a chamber where political loyalties and self-interest have historically proven as consequential as the evidence. The law is clear. The math is treacherous.

What happens if the Senate fails to convict? The financial irregularities will not disappear. The constitutional questions will not dissolve themselves. The AMLC records will not un-exist. But Sara Duterte will walk away from the process politically unscathed — emboldened even — with a plausible claim that she was persecuted and she survived. In Philippine political culture, that narrative can be transformed into electoral capital.

Which leads to the most alarming question of all: What if she runs for president in 2028, and wins?

The AMLC revelations, taken alongside her refusal to account for the confidential funds during her tenure as Education Secretary and Vice President and her troubling deference towards China on matters of national sovereignty, sketch the portrait of a leader for whom money is power and accountability is an inconvenience.

These are not peripheral concerns. They speak directly to the kind of presidency she would offer the Filipino people — one where the public coffers would be treated as her personal resources, where scrutiny is met with harassment rather than transparency, and where the national interest bends to foreign preference.

The Philippines has weathered corrupt and imperious leaders before. But to knowingly elect one, with the evidence already on the table, would be a choice the nation would make with its eyes wide open.

The impeachment is not merely about Sara Duterte. It is a test of whether accountability still means anything in this republic. A leader who cannot explain her billions, will not answer for her budgets and bends toward Beijing rather than her own people has no business occupying Malacañang.

The billions in question are not just a legal matter. They are a warning — and warnings ignored have a way of becoming consequences no one can undo.