Plunder raps vs VP Sara revive secret fund issue
Vice President Sara Duterte’s alleged misuse of her P612.5-million confidential fund, one of the charges that got her impeached earlier this year, was revived in a criminal complaint for plunder against her and 14 of her former and current staff by a group of civil society leaders on Friday.
In a 58-page complaint filed in the Office of the Ombudsman, the group, which includes a Catholic priest who received a Ramon Magsaysay Award this year, a former finance undersecretary and a University of the Philippines (UP) professor emerita, accused Duterte of illegal, dubious and anomalous use of the confidential funds of the Office of the Vice President (OVP) and the Department of Education (DepEd) in 2022 and 2023.
In addition to plunder, they also accused her and her staff of bribery, malversation, graft, culpable violation of the Constitution and betrayal of public trust. The latter two charges were grounds for impeachment last February but are not listed as criminal offenses in the Revised Penal Code.
The complainants alleged that Duterte’s staff in the OVP and DepEd engaged in a “coordinated, deliberate system to divert, mishandle and conceal confidential funds” of her two offices then.
Duterte served as education secretary until she resigned in July 2024 following her break with President Marcos, who was her “Uniteam” partner in the 2022 presidential elections. She has since become one of his most bitter critics.
Other respondents
The others who were charged were:
1. Zuleika T. Lopez, chief of staff (OVP)
2. Lemuel G. Ortonio, assistant chief of staff (OVP)
3. Rosalynne L. Sanchez, director for administrative and financial services, (OVP)
4. Julieta L. Villadelrey, chief accountant (OVP)
5. Gina F. Acosta, special disbursing officer (OVP)
6. Col. Raymund Dante P. Lachica, former commander of the defunct Vice Presidential Security and Protection Group (VPSPG)
7. Michael Wesley T. Poa, former education undersecretary and chief of staff of the Office of the Secretary, and head of procuring entity
8. Sunshine Charry A. Fajarda, former director for strategic management office and former assistant secretary (DepEd)
9. Annalyn M. Sevilla, former undersecretary for Finance Service, Project Management Service, Education Program Management Service, Government Assistance and Subsidies Office (DepEd)
10. Gloria Mercado, former head of procurement entity and undersecretary for Human Resources and Regional Development (DepEd)
11. Ma. Rhunna L. Catalan, former chieaccountant (DepEd)
12. Edward D. Fajarda, former special disbursing officer (DepEd)
13. Ret. Maj. Gen. Nolasco A. Mempin, former undersecretary for administration (DepEd)
14. Lt. Col. Dennis Nolasco, former member of the VPSPG
Duterte received P500 million in confidential funds for the OVP and P112.5 million for DepEd from 2022 to 2023.
Duterte and her “co-conspirators” had “maliciously and feloniously conspired to amass, accumulate and acquire ill-gotten wealth” amounting to more than P50 million, the threshold for the crime of plunder, the complaint said.
It said that the OVP and DepEd under Duterte, employed “identical, systematic schemes to circumvent established laws and procedures” with regard to the spending of the confidential funds.
Duterte “directed” the scheme for the OVP allegedly through Acosta, Villadelrey, Ortonio, Sanchez and Lachica. For DepEd, it was through Sunshine and Edward Fajarda, Catalan, Sevilla, Mercado, Mempin and Nolasco, according to the complaint.
Main complainants
The eight main complainants were Ramon Magsaysay awardee Fr. Flaviano Villanueva; activist priest Fr. Roberto Reyes; former Peace Process Adviser Teresita Quintos-Deles; UP professor Sylvia Estrada Claudio; economist and former Finance Undersecretary Cielo Magno; writer and anticorruption advocate Christopher Cabahug; and youth leaders Matthew Christian Silverio and John Lloyd Crisostomo.
“A person who used confidential funds should not hide,” Villanueva told reporters. “Accountability takes precedence before the confidential funds.”
For Magno, the larger issue is the allocation of confidential funds to government agencies with no national security functions.
“So, this is a policy issue that should be addressed because this will guide us in the future on how we spend the people’s money,” she said.
The complaint said that the system used by Duterte in spending her confidential funds “effectively siphoned public funds from government coffers into the hands of nonexistent recipients, for purposes already funded and appropriated for in other agencies.”
“By design, these transactions evaded the standard scrutiny of state auditors, leaving the disposition of these funds entirely unexplainable,” it said.
The way the confidential funds were handled by both the OVP and DepEd followed a common “modus operandi,” it said.
Taken from past hearings
The allegations raised in the complaint were largely based on the testimonies during hearings called by the committee on good government of the House of Representatives last year. Lawmakers then found that majority of the supposed recipients of Duterte’s confidential funds had odd names, such as Mary Grace Piattos—names of a popular restaurant and brand of chips combined.
The recipients with dubious names appeared in 787 acknowledgment receipts with no signatures, 302 with unreadable names and five repeated names, for a total of 1,094 “questionable recipients.”
After Duterte was impeached, the Senate, which was then led by Sen. Francis “Chiz” Escudero, did not immediately turn itself into an impeachment court to try her.
Stopped by SC
The Supreme Court, acting on a petition by Duterte, stopped the trial, ruling that the articles of impeachment against her were invalid for violating the constitutional one-year ban on more than one impeachment complaint against the same official.
It has not yet decided on motions to reconsider its decision from the House and various groups that had filed impeachment complaints against Duterte.
An impeachable official who doesn’t have immunity from lawsuits, unlike the President, can be criminally charged in any prosecutorial body, including the Office of the Ombudsman.
In the case of the Vice President, the complaint can still be processed by prosecutors and they can decide to reject it or proceed to trial, although this would likely be suspended while she is in office.
In 2019, then Vice President Leni Robredo was charged with sedition for an alleged plot to oust then President Rodrigo Duterte, Duterte’s father. She was later cleared by the justice department.
Lawyer Ferdinand Topacio, spokesperson for Partido Demokratiko Pilipino-Lakas ng Bayan (PDP-Laban) party of the Vice President’s father, said the complaints against her were a recycled and rehashed smear campaign aimed at undermining her possible presidential prospects in the 2028 elections.
Topacio said they viewed the complaint with both “alarm and amusement.”
“Amusement, because the allegations are the same rehashed and recycled fabrications from several years ago—prevarications that have been debunked time and again,” Topacio said.
“Alarm, because only a fool would deny that the present Ombudsman [Jesus Crispin Remulla] is nothing but a lapdog of Malacañang, clearly capable of not only bending, but also breaking or disregarding the law to follow the commands of his trainer and master, Mr. Marcos,” he added.
‘Latest rebuff’
He said that the “latest rebuff” of Duterte’s critics was a Commission on Audit (COA) report that gave the OVP the highest audit rating, referring to the state auditor’s “unmodified opinion” on the Vice President’s office.
The same critics, however, have called out her supporters for misrepresenting the “opinion.” They said it just meant that the OVP’s financial statement was presented fairly following accounting standards and indicates good record-keeping. This rating did not mean that public funds were not misused by the OVP, they said.
Topacio argued that if the complainants were serious about going after plunderers, they should focus instead on members of the House of Representatives, whom he accused of “thievery” through budget insertions allegedly enabled by the participation of Mr. Marcos in the budget process.
