Most Filipinos have never held a million pesos in their hands. They have held a thousand, and even that felt like a small miracle-a thin fold of bills that could vanish in a single trip to the palengke, or in one unexpected fever. So when I read that Vice President Sara Duterte and her husband, Atty. Manases Carpio, supposedly kept between 30 and more than 40 bank accounts across eight different banks, my first reaction was not outrage. It was awe.
Thirty accounts. Forty. Across eight banks. In a country where nearly half of all adults-42 to 50 percent of us-have no formal bank account at all, the idea of one household holding dozens of accounts feels less like a financial arrangement and more like a small empire.
And then the numbers. A forensic analyst, lawyer-accountant Alexander Cabrera, told the Senate impeachment court of an alleged P817 million in undeclared assets and unexplained wealth over just four years-2022 to 2025. He broke it down year by year: P190.6 million, then P167.3 million, then P264.2 million, then P195.7 million. The undeclared bank accounts alone, he said, ran P60 million, P80 million, P23 million, P43 million. Set those against her declared net worth-P70 million in 2022 rising to P122 million in 2025-and the declared figures look like the tip of a submerged mountain.
Then the BIR witness, on Day 36, offered a different kind of arithmetic. From 2007 to 2025-eighteen years of labor, of public service, of income-the couple’s total net income after tax came to P85,343,803.23. And yet the 2025 SALN declared a net worth of P98,656,131.20. The prosecution called it a ‘gap.’ A gap of more than P13 million between what 18 years of declared income could produce and what was declared as wealth. The defense objected, reasonably: the BIR witness has no personal knowledge of the SALN. Fine. But still-the gap sits there, waiting, demanding an explanation.
Here is what strikes me deepest. This is not really a story about crime. It is a story about distance.
There is the distance between the Filipino who counts coins and the Filipino who counts banks. There is the distance between a hand-to-mouth life and a life where millions move quietly, untracked, across accounts and corporations-Cale 88, Metro City, GenCorp. And there is the distance between what is declared and what is held-the SALN, that solemn document, and the reality that supposedly does not match it.
I think of the ordinary workers, who never trusted banks and never had enough to need one. I think of the tricycle driver who saves in a piggy bank, the teacher who waits for the 15th and the 30th. We are told to declare what we have, to be honest, to account. And the law asks the same of our leaders-only with so many more zeroes that honesty becomes a different kind of burden entirely.
So my awe turns into something sharper: amazement, yes, but also a quiet, insistent longing for accountability.
Not vengeance. Not the satisfying fall of a powerful name. Just accounting. The oldest, plainest virtue. Let the ledger open. Let the 40 accounts show themselves. Let the P817 million be explained, line by line, until the unexplained becomes the known. Let the gap be closed with evidence or with confession. Let us, the ordinary ones, finally see the whole picture.
Because if the wealthiest among us cannot be counted, then how can we trust that we, too, matter? If money in high places can hide, then the promise of a fair country hides with it.
What stays with me is this: a nation is only as honest as its accounting. We are a people famous for our warmth, our endurance, our pakikisama-but a republic runs on numbers, and numbers must add up. For four years, the prosecution claims, they did not. For a lifetime, many of us have not had enough to make ours add up either.
And so we wait, with awe and with a prayer, for the moment when the two arithmetic worlds-the millionaire’s and the masa’s-are finally made to face each other and reconcile.
Dr. Jesus Lim Arranza is the Chairman Emeritus of the Federation of Philippine Industries and concurrent Chairman of the Anti-Smuggling and Anti-Illicit Trade Committee.