Davao City 1st District Rep. Paolo Duterte has rushed to the defense of his sister, Vice President Sara Duterte, after a Makati Business Club (MBC) official cited the country’s second-highest official’s alleged misuse of confidential funds (CF) to show that corruption is a security threat.
Rep. Duterte, in a statement on Tuesday, said that MBC Executive Director Rafael ‘Apa’ Ongpin should first try running a city or learning about governance before commenting on such issues, like the CF misuse allegations thrown at the vice president.
‘Before you start barking, maybe try running a city first, so you’d actually understand what governance means, Sir,’ he told Ongpin.
‘You talk as if confidential and intelligence funds are some kind of secret stash. You clearly don’t know the nitty-gritty of how it works. Allow me to educate you a bit,’ Rep. Duterte said.
‘These funds are used strictly for information-gathering, security coordination, surveillance, and confidential operations,’ he noted.
‘Every disbursement requires proper documentation, liquidation, and is subject to COA post-audit. These are funds not simply used by anyone – contrary to your usual gossip-based conclusions,’ he added.
Ongpin earned the ire of Rep. Duterte after the former appeared in an interview on Bilyonaryo News Channel’s ‘At the Forefront’ program, to discuss the recent statement from several business groups, including MBC.
MBA had asked President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to resolve the recently discovered corruption issues.
At one point in the discussions, Ongpin was asked about why corruption can be considered a security threat, to which the MBC official responded by mentioning corruption claims in the CF expenditures of Vice President Duterte’s offices from 2022 to 2023.
‘In another sense, I mean, look at, for instance, this NTF-Elcac, you know. And the confidential funds spent by the vice president, supposedly to investigate this or that. But, you know, those are supposed to be for security, right? They’re misspent,’ Ongpin observed.
‘They’re not being spent on national security. She can’t show where the money went, you know,’ he said.
‘And what (are the) results of the investigation? I don’t see them. So, yeah, I mean, when you’ve budgeted money for security, you better spend it on security. Not on, you know, Mary Grace Piattos,’ he suggested.
But Rep. Duterte stressed that her sister’s office is not the only government agency that got CFs, as other offices like the Office of the President, the Department of the Interior and Local Government, the Armed Forces of the Philippines, and the Philippine National Police received these allocations too.
Furthermore, the Davao lawmaker said that the vice president is hated for using these CF to end the communist armed insurgency.
‘Why do you think leftist groups hate the VP? Because of the efforts of the vice president as DepEd (Department of Education) chief to end recruitments by the NPA (New People’s Army) from the grassroots level and strengthening the education sector,’ Rep. Duterte said.
‘And before you question the vice president’s office, maybe look around first. You think only the OVP gets confidential funds?’ he asked.
Piattos is one of the names that were seen as signatories of acknowledgement receipts (ARs) for CF expenses made by Duterte’s offices – the Office of the Vice President (OVP) and previously, the Department of Education (DepEd).
ARs are documents submitted to the Commission on Audit to prove that funding for projects reached its intended beneficiaries, which in this case, are confidential informants.
During the hearings of the House committee on good government and public accountability during the 19th Congress, Antipolo City 2nd District Rep. Romeo Acop noticed that one of the individuals who signed the ARs was named Mary Grace Piattos, which he said is a name similar to a restaurant and a potato chip brand.
Later on, Lanao del Sur 1st District Rep. Zia Alonto Adiong showed two ARs – one from OVP and another from DepEd – which were both received by a certain Kokoy Villamin.
However, the signatures and handwriting used by Villamin in the two documents differed.
Both Piattos and Villamin’s names were also not found inside the Philippine Statistics Authority database for live birth, marriage, and death.
Since this discovery, more weird names were found: Deputy Speaker and La Union 1st District Rep. Paolo Ortega V released different lists containing names resembling those of public officials, multiple ‘Fionas,’ a ‘Magellan’ and another individual with the surname ‘Ewan,’ which is a Filipino slang for ‘I don’t know.’
Ortega also released a set of names said to be from a grocery shopping list, while there were some names that sounded like a phone brand – Xiaome Ocho.
Aside from Vice President Duterte, several public officials and companies have been at the hot seat recently due to corruption allegations.
In his fourth State of the Nation Address last July 2025, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. condemned government officials and contractors who allegedly benefited from flood control projects at the expense of the people.
Eventually, Marcos inspected several projects which were then revealed to be either substandard or completely non-existent.
Investigations from different bodies – including Congress – followed suit, and several lawmakers were implicated as either having interests in the companies that do flood control projects, or were accused of diverting funds for such purposes. /apl