VP Impeachment Trial to Delve into Tax, Bank Records

The Senate impeachment court will next tackle the subpoenaed bank and tax records of Vice President Sara Duterte and her husband Manases Carpio, as well as their businesses. This move is part of Article II for alleged unexplained wealth of the Vice President. Impeachment court spokesman Reginald Tongol confirmed that the trial dates previously allotted for the prosecution’s presentation on the alleged misuse of confidential funds (Article I), which had 31 trial dates, will be deferred. The prosecution has concluded its presentation of evidence on grave threats (Article 4), stemming from a November 2024 livestreamed press conference where the Vice President allegedly stated she had hired a hitman to kill President Marcos, First Lady Liza Marcos, and former House Speaker Martin Romualdez if she were killed. Tongol stated that the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) has complied with the subpoena for the Vice President’s tax and bank records, submitting four red boxes to the Senate on Thursday. These boxes contain the tax records of the Duterte couple, along with those of 19 corporate entities and one law firm linked to them. The subpoenaed documents cover the period from 2007 to 2025, including the time Duterte served as Davao City mayor and vice mayor. The court permitted the inclusion of documents from the period when Duterte was not yet an impeachable officer to establish the financial baseline of her wealth as Vice President. In addition to the BIR, the Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) and several banks, including Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI), BDO Unibank, Philippine Savings Bank, Metropolitan Bank & Trust Company, Landbank of the Philippines, and Security Bank Corporation, have also complied with subpoenas for relevant documents pertaining to the Duterte couple. The AMLC has provided the court with copies of its reports on covered and suspicious transactions involving Duterte and her husband. The court secretariat is expected to be occupied with photocopying these "voluminous documents" to ensure all parties—prosecution, defense, and senator-judges—receive copies, Tongol noted. Both the prosecution and defense can select documents relevant to their case, provided they are pre-marked before presentation in court. The defense team has stressed that the admissibility of the tax records of the Vice President and her husband is not automatic, even with the President's approval to open the BIR boxes. Defense spokesman Michael Poa indicated that they might pursue legal remedies to challenge the President's decision, stating, "Not just the legal remedies outside the impeachment court but within the proceedings itself. We can still object if we think that there are things that should not be admitted as evidence here." He also maintained that the defense team is unafraid of the documents contained within the BIR boxes.