Prosecution to bare more dubious names in VP fund
More questionable names listed as recipients in receipts used to justify Vice President Sara Duterte’s confidential spending may surface as House prosecutors press their case that she misused hundreds of millions of pesos in confidential funds, a lawmaker said on Sunday.
Deputy Speaker Paolo Ortega V said more unusual names could emerge when state auditor Xylene Mae del Ocampo, chief of the Commission on Audit’s (COA) Intelligence and Confidential Funds Audit Office, takes the stand on Monday.
“Let’s wait and see, because our prosecutors have their own strategy,” Ortega said in Filipino. “I’m sure they will discuss them.”
The prosecution last week raised several names listed as recipients of Duterte’s confidential fund disbursements during the testimony of state auditor Roderick Wamil before the Senate impeachment court.
Among those cited were Mary Grace Piattos, Renan Piattos, Miko Harina, Andy Lim and Alejandro Pikit.
Private prosecutor Lorna Kapunan also said some names in acknowledgment receipts the prosecution plans to present resembled a “fruit salad,” noting that beneficiaries included Mango and Keso.
“These can be aliases, but these are really fictitious names,” Kapunan said.
The unusual names prompted a congressional inquiry in 2024 into Duterte’s alleged misuse of confidential funds. Lawmakers asked the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) to check the identities of the supposed beneficiaries.
The PSA later reported to the House that 1,322 beneficiaries of the Office of the Vice President’s (OVP) P500 million in confidential spending in 2022 and 2023 had no birth records. The figure represented about two-thirds of the 1,992 names submitted by the House good government committee to the civil registry. Only 670 names had a “most likely matched” status with official birth records.
The registry also found that 405 out of 677 recipients of the Department of Education’s (DepEd) P112.5-million confidential fund disbursement in 2023 had no birth certificates, 445 had no marriage records, and 508 lacked death certificates.
Check identities
Sen. Panfilo Lacson said on Sunday that the COA should have examined the identities listed in confidential fund receipts to ensure a thorough review of Duterte’s spending.
“The Commission on Audit should have checked who Mary Grace Piattos, Patty Ting, and Andy Lim really were,” Lacson told dzBB radio in Filipino, according to a statement from his office.
Lacson said aliases were common in confidential operations but stressed the true identities of sources should still have been recorded in the documents.
Wamil said last week that the COA’s examination of Duterte’s use of confidential funds did not verify whether names on acknowledgment receipts belonged to real people or were aliases because audit rules governing such funds are silent on code names.
Duterte’s former special disbursing officers (SDOs) are expected to testify this week, along with Del Ocampo, who will explain the COA’s audit of the Vice President’s confidential spending, prosecution spokesperson Benjamin Tolosa Jr. said.
He said prosecutors would treat Gina Acosta, the OVP’s special disbursing officer for confidential funds, and Edward Fajarda, DepEd’s SDO for its confidential budget, as hostile witnesses.
“That means their interests are averse to the party that called them as witnesses,” Tolosa said.
A hostile-witness designation allows lawyers during direct examination to ask leading questions because the witness is treated as adversarial to the party calling them.
“Let’s watch their testimonies, because they are the special disbursement officers,” Tolosa said, recalling testimony from two Land Bank of the Philippines branch managers identifying Acosta and Fajarda as the officials who received the money for the OVP and DepEd, respectively.
Bank managers Violeta Constantino and Nenita Camposano told the impeachment court that Acosta and Fajarda were the payees of confidential fund checks withdrawn in cash. Both said such huge cash withdrawals were unusual for government agencies.
The cash was bundled and packed into long gym bags in 2022 and 2023, according to the bank managers.
“It will be good to hear from them, since they are accountable for it,” Tolosa said. “When they received it, where did they bring it, where did they use it?”
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