By Benjamin Cuaresma
MANILA — The prosecution is preparing to put more questionable names under the Senate impeachment court’s microscope as it presses its case that Vice President Sara Duterte’s handling of hundreds of millions of pesos in confidential funds was riddled with irregularities.
Deputy Speaker Paolo Ortega V said Sunday that more unusual names could emerge when Xylene Mae del Ocampo, chief of the Commission on Audit’s Intelligence and Confidential Funds Audit Office, takes the witness stand.
“Let’s wait and see, because our prosecutors have their own strategy,” Ortega said, signaling that the names and documents already exposed during the trial may only be the beginning.
The prosecution last week highlighted several names appearing in acknowledgment receipts presented as documentation for Duterte’s confidential fund disbursements, including Mary Grace Piattos, Renan Piattos, Miko Harina, Andy Lim and Alejandro Pikit.
Private prosecutor Lorna Kapunan also called attention to other names appearing in the receipts, describing the list as resembling a “fruit salad” and pointing to supposed beneficiaries identified as Mango and Keso.
Kapunan said such names could be aliases but characterized them as fictitious names.
The issue has become a central point in the prosecution’s effort to challenge the credibility of documents used to account for confidential fund expenditures.
The controversy over the identities of supposed beneficiaries had already triggered a congressional inquiry in 2024.
The Philippine Statistics Authority was asked to verify the names associated with confidential fund disbursements of the Office of the Vice President (OVP).
The PSA subsequently reported that 1,322 of 1,992 names submitted for verification in connection with the OVP’s P500 million confidential fund expenditures in 2022 and 2023 had no birth records.
Only 670 names were classified as having a “most likely matched” status with civil registry records.
Questions also emerged from the confidential fund expenditures of the Department of Education.
Of 677 names associated with P112.5 million in DepEd confidential fund disbursements in 2023, the PSA found that 405 had no birth certificates, 445 had no marriage records and 508 had no death records.
Sen. Panfilo Lacson said the Commission on Audit should have gone further in examining the identities appearing in the confidential fund documents.
Lacson specifically cited names such as Mary Grace Piattos, Patty Ting and Andy Lim, saying auditors should have determined who they actually were.
While aliases may be used in legitimate confidential operations, Lacson said the real identities of sources should still be properly established in the relevant records.
Former COA state auditor Roderick Wamil, however, testified that the audit of Duterte’s confidential fund utilization did not verify whether the names appearing on acknowledgment receipts belonged to actual individuals or were aliases.
He said existing audit rules governing confidential funds did not specifically address the use of code names.
The prosecution is also preparing to question Duterte’s former special disbursing officers as the impeachment trial moves deeper into the confidential-funds issue.
Prosecution spokesperson Benjamin Tolosa Jr. said Gina Acosta, the OVP’s special disbursing officer for confidential funds, and Edward Fajarda, who handled DepEd’s confidential budget, are expected to testify this week.
The prosecution intends to treat both as hostile witnesses, meaning they may be subjected to leading questions during direct examination because their interests are considered adverse to the side calling them.
Their testimony is expected to focus on what happened after confidential fund money was withdrawn from government accounts.
Two Land Bank of the Philippines branch managers previously testified that Acosta and Fajarda were the payees of checks used to withdraw the confidential funds in cash.
Bank managers Violeta Constantino and Nenita Camposano told the impeachment court that the withdrawals involved unusually large amounts of cash and were not typical transactions for government agencies.
The money, they testified, was bundled and placed in long gym bags during withdrawals in 2022 and 2023.
For prosecutors, the testimony of the special disbursing officers could provide the next critical link in their effort to establish how the confidential funds were actually handled after leaving government bank accounts.
“When they received it, where did they bring it, where did they use it?” Tolosa said.
Those questions now loom over the next phase of the impeachment proceedings, as the Senate court examines not only the questionable names appearing in the receipts but also the chain of custody of the hundreds of millions of pesos in confidential funds.
The coming testimony of the COA audit chief and the special disbursing officers could determine whether the disputed names and questionable documentation point to mere record-keeping deficiencies—or to deeper problems in the use and accounting of confidential public funds.
ia/xf
