THE presiding officer of the Senate Impeachment Court on Monday said House prosecutors appeared to have been ‘ghosted’ by Vice President Sara Duterte’s defense team after repeated attempts to arrange a court-ordered comparison of 4,492 acknowledgment receipts related to her confidential funds went unanswered.
Private prosecutor Lorna Kapunan said Duterte’s lawyers ignored messages requesting a meeting on Thursday or Friday of the previous week, as directed by the Impeachment Court. The defense later proposed a meeting on Aug. 14 – four days after the scheduled resumption of the Commission on Audit auditor Xylene Mae del Campo’s testimony.
‘They stood us up,’ Kapunan told the court.
Presiding Officer Sen. Francis Escudero offered a more contemporary description.
‘Attorney Lorna, you were not merely stood up. Perhaps you were ghosted because they did not respond to you,’ Escudero said.
‘We were ignored,’ Kapunan replied.
‘That is exactly what ghosting means. ‘Ghosting’ is the more modern term,’ Escudero said.
The proposed comparison was intended to determine whether the acknowledgment receipts held by the prosecution matched those in the defense’s possession. If the documents matched, both parties could potentially agree on their authenticity, sparing the court from having to examine thousands of individual records during Del Campo’s testimony.
The 4,492 receipts are part of the documentary evidence being examined by prosecutors to determine how P612.5 million in confidential funds released to the Office of the Vice President (OVP) and the Department of Education (DepEd) under Duterte were accounted for.
Kapunan said prosecutors first contacted the defense on Wednesday to ask whether the parties could meet the following day or on Friday to compare the documents.
They received no immediate response.
‘On Thursday, we waited the entire day. We kept asking when we would meet because it was already Thursday and Friday was the next day. Our witness was scheduled to appear on Monday, but we still received no response for the entire day,’ she said.
According to Kapunan, the defense finally responded at 5:38 p.m. on Thursday and proposed Aug. 14 as the meeting date.
‘August 14, what good will that do us? The hearing is today, August 10,’ she said.
Kapunan accused Duterte’s lawyers of acting in bad faith, noting that the Presiding Officer had specifically identified Thursday or Friday as the dates for the comparison.
‘That constitutes bad faith, Your Honor, because the presiding officer specifically directed the parties to meet on Thursday or Friday of last week,’ she said.
Kapunan added that prosecutors made one final attempt shortly before Monday’s hearing, offering to begin the comparison despite having only an hour remaining.
‘They refused,’ she said.
Duterte’s defense counsel, Kristine Ferrer, argued that comparing the documents was unnecessary merely to speed up the proceedings.
‘We do not even need to compare the exhibits to expedite the proceedings,’ Ferrer said.
She maintained that questions concerning the documents’ authenticity could be addressed after the prosecution formally offered them as evidence.
Nevertheless, Ferrer said the defense would not object to del Campo presenting summaries of the voluminous records, provided that she remained subject to cross-examination.
Escudero confirmed that he had instructed both parties to attempt to meet on Thursday or Friday.
‘The chair issued an order directing the parties to try to meet on Thursday or Friday,’ he said.
He then ordered Duterte’s lawyers to provide the court with copies of their pre-marked evidence so that the court could conduct the comparison itself.
The records consist of 2,668 Office of the Vice President acknowledgment receipts and 1,824 Department of Education acknowledgment receipts.
The P612.5 million under examination includes P500 million in confidential funds released to the OVP from December 2022 to September 2023 and P112.5 million released to DepEd while Duterte was serving as education secretary in 2023.