SALNs for selective memory



Somebody is not telling the truth, and Nosy Tarsee wants to know why.

The Philippines and the United States have signed a $60-million (about P3.68 billion) Millennium Challenge Corp. (MCC)…

President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. said the continued expansion of the Luzon Economic Corridor (LEC) reflects growing…

Agriculture Secretary Francisco P. Tiu Laurel Jr. has called for stronger ASEAN-India cooperation as geopolitical…

Thirty micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) from Sorsogon will bring their locally made products to Metro Manila…

An accountant climbed into Nosy Tarsee’s peaceful tree abode last week with a folder and a grudge.
In the folder were years of Statement of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth (SALN) filings, annotated, cross-checked against Securities and Exchange Commission records, and stitched together into a pattern too consistent to be accidental. The timing is delicious.
SALN honesty is exactly the question hanging over the impeachment trial of a certain Vice President, and the source wanted the wider public to see how routine the sleight-of-hand really was among the political class.
An heiress-senator — old money and older connections — ran a wellness spa registered under a name borrowed from a different faith tradition entirely. Her husband co-owned it. Neither the spa nor the hubby appeared in four straight years of her SALNs. Four other companies bearing her signature and tax ID — one for moving cargo, three sitting on holdings worth eight figures combined — never made her lists either.
A senator-turned-mayor left a hometown foundation off his SALN the year he ran it jointly with his wife, then a sitting city mayor. Two more foundations, stacked with fellow legislators as trustees, vanished from his books a few years later.
And a current Cabinet member has his own gap. His congresswoman wife sits on a children’s charity that received a fortune from her personal contributions — absent from their joint SALN.
A separate holding company traces back to her, too, except the tax ID attached to that filing belonged, curiously, to someone else entirely. A ghost signature doing the paperwork so she wouldn’t have to.
If the omissions matter enough to end a vice presidency or a Supreme Court post, Nosy Tarsee wonders aloud, why have they never mattered enough to end anything else?