Mans claims bills, denies Sara link

Lawyer Manases Carpio defended his credit card purchases in Japan and Malaysia as personal expenses, rejecting attempts to link the transactions to Vice President Sara Duterte as the Senate impeachment court examines allegations that the couple accumulated P817.87 million in undeclared assets and income from 2022 to 2025.

In a statement, Carpio said he paid for the purchases with his own money and that Duterte was neither involved in nor present when the expenses were incurred.

“There is nothing illegal about spending my own hard-earned money. No public funds were used for these personal expenses,” Carpio said.

He explained that he used his credit card to settle bills during a group trip to Japan because several participants lacked cash and later shared the costs.

He described purchases at Nike stores in Davao City as shared expenses for senior basketball players and those in Kuala Lumpur as expenses for junior basketball players who won a championship in Malaysia.

The transactions flagged by the prosecution’s financial forensic analyst Alexander Cabrera included two Nike SM Davao purchases totaling about P300,000, a P256,882.50 purchase at Nike Pavilion in Kuala Lumpur and a P205,000 bill at Ginza Inakaya restaurant in Tokyo.

‘Collateral damage’

Cabrera, the House prosecution’s final witness, presented his analysis of the couple’s financial records before the impeachment court on 9 October.

Carpio questioned the disclosure of his personal credit card transactions through subpoenas issued in connection with the impeachment proceedings, warning that the information could be used to damage his reputation.

“Any discussion of these transactions should be based on the actual circumstances, the source of the money, and the purpose of the expenditures — not on insinuations that have no factual basis,” he said.

Carpio had earlier described himself as “collateral damage” in the impeachment proceedings, saying investigators appeared to be dragging him into the controversy surrounding his wife.

Detailed evidence

Meanwhile, political science analyst Dennis Coronacion said Duterte’s defense faced an uphill battle against the prosecution’s allegations because of the volume of bank transactions, tax records and corporate documents presented.

Coronacion, former president of the Philippine Political Science Association and chairman of the University of Santo Tomas Department of Political Science, said the defense would have to challenge both Cabrera’s computations and the prosecution’s interpretation of the underlying records.

“It is really difficult because the evidence is detailed and supported by documents, government records and private company records. That is a formidable challenge,” Coronacion said in a radio interview.

He said Duterte’s lawyers could scrutinize individual transactions and calculations, challenge Cabrera’s methodology and question his personal knowledge of the information he examined.

He said the defense could seek to reduce the amount attributed to the couple by examining each document and disputing how the prosecution interpreted particular transactions.

“At the end of the day, we will test their conflicting claims or narratives against the evidence that emerges so we can remain objective. We will follow the court process,” Coronacion said.