The insistence of Vice President Sara Duterte’s camp on refusing to stipulate and authenticate documents from their client’s office has caused an inordinate delay in her ongoing impeachment proceedings at the Senate, a member of the House prosecution team said.

In a radio interview on Sunday, 9 August, House prosecutor Rep. Terry Ridon said the prosecution viewed the defense’s effort to validate thousands of documents from the Office of the Vice President (OVP) and the Department of Education (DepEd) as a way to prolong the trial.

Ridon described the defense’s stance as “laughable,” noting that Duterte’s camp had refused to allow the prosecution to use documents from their own offices.

“Well since the defense did not agree to stipulate, we will proceed to the presentation of the acknowledgement receipts, that's why we said that we would just use their list, their documents, but they did not agree,” he said.

“We view it as sort of a delaying tactic, since it is their very own documents that we are talking about but they still don't want to stipulate.”

Despite the volume of documents involved in Article I of the impeachment case, Ridon clarified that the prosecution did not intend to present every record, particularly the thousands of acknowledgment receipts.

He said the prosecution’s main objective was to establish that the names listed as recipients of the funds were fictitious and that the millions in confidential funds allocated to the OVP and DepEd were not properly used.

Court sets date for document authentication

Following arguments over the validity of the documents on Wednesday, 5 August, the impeachment court set 14 August for both parties to compare and stipulate on their respective documents.

Private prosecutor Atty. Jay Tolosa said the dispute over the certification of documents stemmed from the defense’s rejection of the prosecution’s proposal during the June pretrial conference to jointly mark common exhibits.

Tolosa raised concerns about the timing of the meeting, noting that the documents to be discussed form part of the upcoming testimony of state auditor Xylene Mae del Campo.

“We will have to let the presiding officer know about this to make it clear that we are not causing a delay for this. We are really trying to find ways to expedite, but this is what happened,” Tolosa said.

He added that the prosecution was prepared to adapt to the disputes over the documents’ validity and authenticate them during the proceedings, but warned that doing so would consume additional time.