Poor quality of legal advice

This week’s hearings in the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte appears to have shown her cavalier treatment of her obligation to file accurate and truthful official reports.

According to the General Information Sheet (GIS) filed in the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), as testified on by the head of its Company Registration and Monitoring Department, for the period covering 2022 to 2024, she was a member of the board of directors of Metro City Chow Foods Corp.

In maintaining that position while still a VP, she may have violated the provision in the Constitution that prohibits the president, vice president, and Cabinet members from engaging directly or indirectly in any business.

Later in the hearing, the prosecution showed that in her statement of assets, liabilities, and net worth (SALN) from 2016 to 2025, she stated that she was a stockholder of GenCorp Industries, Inc., a company that secured multimillion peso contracts from the government from 2022 to 2026.

Note that the GIS is required to be signed under oath (or notarized) by the corporate secretary and the SALN by the government official concerned, otherwise they will not be compliant with the regulations.

If any misrepresentations or inaccuracies are found in any of those documents, its signatory may be held liable for perjury.

In the course of the hearing, it was later shown that none of the GIS on file that listed the VP as either a stockholder or director mentioned her as a stockholder of GenCorp.

The GISs and the discrepancy in content between them and the SALNs do not speak well of the quality of legal advice that the VP may have been getting from her legal advisers.

Being a lawyer (whose 80 percent grade in the bar examinations was crowed about by her lawyers during an earlier hearing), it is reasonable to assume that the VP is aware of the constitutional prohibition on engaging in business while she is in office.

The same assumption can apply to her husband who is also a lawyer and, unlike her who has spent most of her professional life in politics, is in the active practice of law.

Thus, it’s a big puzzler why, in spite of the presence of two legal minds living in the same household, that prohibition did not cross their mind before, during, and after the preparation and filing of the GIS.

Note that under SEC regulations, the corporate secretary can file an amended GIS if there are supervening events or circumstances that necessitate the amendment of an earlier filed GIS.

Assuming that the VP and her husband may, due to heavy professional commitments, overlooked that prohibition, the same should have been caught by her legal advisers, if not the corporate secretary if he or she is a lawyer.

Until the VP’s lawyer can come up with a plausible explanation, that omission (whether deliberate or otherwise) smacks of a sense of entitlement or the belief that nobody would probably notice it.

But now that it has been seen by the public on television and social media, the fact remains she appears to have violated that particular constitutional provision, despite her lawyers’ efforts to make light of it.

It is immaterial that some of those corporations did not declare dividends that could have increased the VP’s income because what is relevant is her probable involvement in a prohibited activity.

When the VP’s turn to present her evidence comes, it would make good reading for lawyers to find out how her lawyers would show that there is nothing morally or legally wrong in engaging in business while serving as the second highest official of the land.

Another sore point on the matter is the discrepancy in content earlier mentioned between the VP’s SALN and GIS filings.

No doubt, the VP leaves to her staff the preparation of her SALNs and other official reports that she is required to submit to government offices.

Reliance on the support staff in the preparation of those reports is standard operating procedure in government offices and the private sector. She has more important things to do than get involved in routine administrative functions.

Unlike the GIS where the corporate secretary can be held liable for any errors or misrepresentations, in the SALN, it’s the government official who signed it who has to answer for any violations in the manner and form of its submission.

Whoever prepared the subject SALNs and made the VP sign them did not diligently review or check the VP’s past and current financial records to make sure they are consistent with each other.

This is not surprising because when the filing of periodic or annual reports becomes a matter of routine or a cut-and-paste activity, there is a tendency for whoever prepares it to be less careful in its preparation or treat it like a template.

Considering the financial resources available to the VP, she should not have difficulty looking for good legal advisers.

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raul.palabrica@inquirer.net.

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