Sara fund case gets 31 trial days

The prosecution team’s presentation of arguments on the alleged misuse of Vice President Sara Duterte’s P612.5 million in confidential funds will span 31 days, taking up the lion’s share of the 62 trial days allocated to them by the Senate impeachment court.

The court set 92 trial dates, which will be divided between the prosecution and the defense. Duterte’s legal team was initially given 30 days to file its response to the case.

The pre-trial order, signed by Senate President Win Gatchalian on Monday, showed that the bulk of the trial dates allocated to the House prosecutors will be used to argue Article 1, the case concerning the supposed misuse of secret funds.

This is followed by Article 2, or the purported unexplained wealth and discrepancies in Duterte’s SALN, with 12 trial dates.

Meanwhile, 11 trial dates were allotted by the prosecutors to present their evidence detailing Duterte’s “assassination plot” against President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and others under Article 4.

Allegations of bribery and corruption in the Department of Education during Duterte’s stint as its secretary will have the fewest trial dates, with eight.

Duterte is the first top government official to be impeached twice, the first time in February last year.

She needs only nine votes from the senator-judges to be acquitted of any one of the four charges. Conversely, 16 votes in favor of conviction could remove her from office and permanently bar her from seeking another one, derailing her 2028 presidential bid.

Duterte has repeatedly dismissed the allegations of wrongdoing, deriding the impeachment cases as politically motivated. Earlier this week, she requested that the Senate impeachment court dismiss the impeachment case against her, alleging that the House had violated the one-year bar rule anew, which prohibits the filing of more than one impeachment case against the same official within a year.

This is the same argument she invoked last year, which led the Supreme Court to strike down the first impeachment case against her in June last year as “unconstitutional” and void ab initio (from the beginning).

The House prosecutors, however, fiercely pushed back against Duterte’s petition, asserting that the trial must proceed because there is nothing in the Constitution that allows the Senate impeachment court to dismiss a verified impeachment complaint.

The impeachment trial will run from Monday to Wednesday at 2 p.m. beginning on 6 July. The schedule would subsequently be changed to Tuesday to Thursday at 3 p.m. after the President’s State of the Nation Address on 27 July.

The prosecution and the defense have been given three days, or until Thursday, to raise their concerns about the pre-trial order.

The opposing camps will share 17 common witnesses, including Ombudsman Crispin Remulla, former Senator Antonio Trillanes IV and Ramil Madriaga, a confessed “bagman” of Duterte.

The prosecution listed 57 witnesses, including the “Mary Grace Piattos,” one of the supposed recipients of the confidential funds, who has no civil registry records, as confirmed by the Philippine Statistics Authority.

On the other hand, the defense will present 45 witnesses, including former executive secretary Lucas Bersamin and former NBI chief Jaime Santiago.

The Senate on Tuesday finalized the inspection of the trial premises, particularly the plenary hall and the facilities that guests will use during the trial.

The defense and the prosecution will also conduct separate inspections of their designated areas this week.

“We’re on track, and even though the space is limited, we’ve managed to put everything in order,” Gatchalian told reporters on the sidelines of the walk-through.