‘Documents don’t lie, people do.’
This was how a senior administration lawmaker described Vice President Sara Duterte’s attempts to ‘spin’ the narrative around her alleged unexplained wealth, following the mismatch in her bank account transactions and her declared statements of assets, liabilities and net worth (SALNs).
‘No matter what spin you want to show the world, the billions of pesos in transactions of VP Duterte clearly showed one thing: None of these were declared in her SALN,’ House committee on good government and public accountability and Manila 3rd district Rep. Joel Chua said.
‘They are just fooling the people with these alibis that small transactions reach billions through time. But the bottom line question here remains: Why did she not declare this in her SALNs?’ the House justice committee member asked.
For Chua, the Vice President’s camp is again resorting to diversion and narrative fog to distract from the central contradiction raised in the justice committee hearings.
‘This is a classic case of obfuscation. They’re claiming it (figures) is bloated, they’re diverting the issues,’ Chua said.
The glaring disparity between Duterte’s hidden assets that reached P6.7 billion and the P88 million declared in her SALN is the ‘smoking gun’ in her eventual impeachment, an opposition lawmaker said last week.
‘For me, this is a smoking gun, at least insofar as probable cause is concerned,’ Akbayan party-list Rep. Chel Diokno told reporters in a chance interview. ‘The VP has to explain what came out in the Anti-Money Laundering Council report compared to the SALNs she submitted.’
‘There is a very stark contrast or difference, the discrepancy of the two amounts are just so enormous that either here in our (justice) committee or in the Senate – whichever forum she prefers – she really has to make an explanation,’ the human rights lawyer added.
Diokno pointed out that records from the Office of the Ombudsman show Duterte declared a net worth of only P88.5 million in her latest SALN for 2024, where in previous years she declared between P7.5 million in 2007 up to P55.6 million in 2019, when she was Davao City mayor.