THE Senate impeachment court’s ruling allowing the prosecution to subpoena Vice President Sara Duterte’s financial records is being sold by Akbayan Rep. Jose Manuel Diokno as a major victory. In fact, it buries the unexplained wealth article by sharply limiting what financial records can be used.

The court did grant subpoenas for bank records, Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) reports, and Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) documents going back to 2007. But it added a crucial condition: Records from before Sara Duterte became vice president may be used only to establish a financial “baseline,” not to prosecute alleged impeachable acts outside the articles of impeachment. 

That restriction, not the mere issuance of subpoenas, is the heart of the ruling.

The written order makes this explicit. The requested records are “sought to establish the Respondent’s financial baseline and capacity, and not to inquire into or prosecute alleged impeachable acts occurring outside the present Articles of Impeachment.” These “are required to establish a factual baseline against which the Respondent’s assets, financial transactions and business interests during her present term may be assessed.” In simple terms: Pre‑2022 records cannot be used to prove corruption committed before Duterte assumed the vice presidency; they can only show what her legitimate financial position was at that point.

(more…)

LAST Wednesday, the House prosecution panel did something no confident litigator would ever do: It abandoned its own witnesses en masse, signaling they were giving up on their absurd “kill-BBM” impeachment charge, Article 4 of the case against Sara Duterte.

Lead prosecutor and Batangas Rep. Gerville Luistro announced they would no longer present six witnesses lined up to prove Article IV — the charge that Vice President Sara Duterte threatened to have President Marcos, the first lady and former House speaker Martin Romualdez killed if she is killed, presumably as ordered by them. Even the defense was surprised that the prosecution had withdrawn its subpoena for Sara’s chief of staff, Zuleika Lopez, to testify.

Private prosecutor Lorna Kapunan, reportedly the prosecution team’s star lawyer, had to be deployed to add to two prosecutors’ blah-blahs to “manifest” — in violation of fair-play procedure, the presiding judge Sen. Francis Escudero later ruled — that the past two witnesses had already argued sufficiently for the threat charge, and they just wanted to save the court’s time.

(more…)

MERALCO’S July rate hike is more than a routine monthly adjustment. Buried in the utility’s own supplier breakdown is a stark illustration of what it actually costs the country to depend on imported liquefied natural gas (LNG) instead of gas produced at home.

The gap between the two is no longer a rounding error — it is now the single clearest argument for why the Philippines needs to protect what remains of its indigenous gas supply.

Meralco’s residential rate rose by P0.3428 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) in July, from P14.4833/kWh in June to P14.8261/kWh — enough to add roughly P69 to the monthly bill of a household consuming 200 kWh.

(more…)

TEN years since the 2016 arbitral award on the Philippine suit vs China, this paper ran two columns side by side on July 14 — one by Orlando “Orly” Mercado, who once headed the Department of National Defense, and one by Rafael “Raffy” Alunan III, who once headed the Department of Interior and Local Government under Fidel Ramos. Both are intelligent men. And both, reading their columns together, produced almost interchangeable pieces that could have been drafted at a Pentagon or State Department press shop.

Mercado opens by calling the 2016 arbitral ruling “one of the greatest legal victories” in our history, one that supposedly established our “sovereign rights” over the West Philippine Sea and rejected China’s claims outright.

Only President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and his mouthpieces make this claim. None of the countries closest to us, the Asean countries — even Vietnam and Malaysia that have similar maritime disputes with China — share Marcos’ delusion.

(more…)

AT 2:29 a.m. on Nov. 23, 2024, Zuleika Lopez — Vice President Sara Duterte’s chief of staff and close personal friend of over two decades — was found vomiting and shaking in a House of Representatives detention room, in the throes of what her doctors would later diagnose as acute stress disorder.

Hours earlier, the Marcos-controlled House Committee on Good Government and Public Accountability had ordered Lopez detained for contempt for not “fully cooperating with the committee,” and later directed that she be transferred not to an ordinary congressional holding room, but to the Correctional Institution for Women in Mandaluyong, the prison where convicted female criminals serve out their sentences.

In desperation, Sara Duterte physically blocked the transfer, introduced herself not as the vice president but as Lopez’s lawyer, and refused to leave the premises. She called it, bluntly, attempted homicide. It was the House committee’s attempt to get Lopez to implicate her in some imagined crime. It was also a message that they could do what they wanted even if she was the second most powerful official in the land.

(more…)

MARCOS’ twin plot to secure his regime’s hold on power — the impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte and the crushing of opposition figures, symbolized by the jailing of Sen. Rodante Marcoleta — effectively began yesterday, as if some exasperated deity, tired of Filipino blindness, decided to compress the opening shots into a single day so no one could pretend not to see.

Hours after the Senate impeachment court moved from preliminaries into the formal trial phase against VP Sara, the Sandiganbayan anti-graft court — over the weekend after the Ombudsman filed the case last Friday — scrambled to raffle the case to its Third Division, which promptly ordered the arrest of the pro-Duterte Marcoleta on some absurd charge of plunder.

The Senate, already convened as an impeachment court since May 18, had locked in July 6 as the start of the trial proper, with senators sitting four afternoons a week as “judges” in what is the biggest political case of this administration. On that same date, Marcoleta went to the Third Division, thinking he could argue for the case to be dismissed. Instead, he was led away by the Philippine National Police’s (PNP) burly policemen, handcuffed and hauled to the PNP jail in Payatas, in a convoy of vans and SUVs.

(more…)

THE filing of a non-bailable plunder case against Sen. Rodante Marcoleta over P75 million in private campaign donations is not just another headline in our endless graft drama; it is a watershed in the weaponization of law in this country. By treating lawful campaign support from private individuals as “ill-gotten wealth” under the Plunder Law, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Ombudsman Jesus Crispin Remulla have opened a legal Pandora’s box that can swallow any political opponent — and any citizen reckless enough to support one generously.

According to the Ombudsman’s own public statements and media reports, the plunder case hinges on P75 million in campaign contributions that three private individuals allegedly gave Marcoleta in January 2025: P30 million from former congressman Mike Defensor, and P45 million from businessmen Joseph Espiritu and Aristotle Viray. These are not alleged kickbacks from a flood control project, nor commissions from an overpriced contract, nor money taken from the Treasury. They are private funds, donated during an election season, which the Ombudsman now says were not declared in Marcoleta’s statement of contributions and expenditures (SOCE), and in his state of assets, liabilities and net worth — and on that basis alone are being treated as “ill-gotten wealth” reaching the P50-million plunder threshold.

The Ombudsman has even invented its own English dictionary: “plunder” — derived from the German plündern that arose from the 1630s Thirty Years War — has always meant robbing, pillaging the public treasury, skimming off fat contracts, diverting money held in trust. Republic Act (RA) 7080 defines plunder as the amassing of ill-gotten wealth of at least P50 million through “misappropriation, conversion or outright taking of public funds, or through a series of corrupt acts anchored on public office.” In every major plunder case of the past — from the Marcos and military-linked Swiss deposits, to the Estrada “jueteng” and tobacco excise funds scandal — the core accusation has been the same: public money or benefits from public power, illegally diverted into private hands.

Now, for the first time, the Ombudsman has decided that private campaign donations, unaccompanied by any proven kickback scheme, can themselves be the “ill-gotten wealth” in a plunder information. He has to do that of course, because if Marcoleta is accused of a crime in which the graft money is less than P50 million, he can post bail. Marcos’ order to take out Marcoleta from the political landscape was emboldened by the jailing of Sen. Jinggoy Estrada and the forcing of another senator, Ronald dela Rosa, into becoming a fugitive to evade an alleged warrant of arrest by a foreign court. Remulla and his ill-paid lawyers do not even see how ridiculous it is to call very voluntary donations as plunder.

(more…)

Marcoleta, a former party-list lawmaker who became senator only in 2025, had also become the most articulate non-Marcos voice on corruption as chairman of the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee and a key ally of Vice President Sara Duterte. He was removed as head of that committee when President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s minions on June 3 took control of the Senate with 13 votes, just one vote more from the bloc headed by Alan Peter Cayetano.

Not only that, Marcoleta, in just a year as senator, has demonstrated to tower in intellectual capacity and eloquence way above his colleagues in the Senate. He is one of just four attorneys in the 24-member Senate, a worrying situation in a chamber that drafts laws. If Duterte is banned for running for the presidency in 2028, Marcoleta would be the shoo-in for the post, so he now becomes the Marcos gang’s second target for political assassination.

To further see what’s really obvious: the Ombudsman is far, far unlike the United States district attorney offices, which are roughly the equivalent of the Ombudsman with the Justice Department. These have 35,120 attorneys and 44,150 full-time non-attorney staff. How many attorneys does our Ombudsman have together with the prosecutorial staff of the Justice department? Fifty. Yes, 50, with each lawyer handling at least 300 cases.

(more…)

SOMETHING remarkable happened yesterday, something that should give Ombudsman Jesus Crispin “Boying” Remulla pause, assuming he is capable of pausing to reflect on anything other than his next political maneuver.

The day after Remulla announced he was filing a nonbailable plunder case against Sen. Rodante Marcoleta in the Sandiganbayan, at least 50,000 Iglesia Ni Cristo (INC) members gathered at the EDSA People Power Monument in Quezon City without a permit, without advance notice and, most strikingly, without the usual three-day logistics buildup that normally precedes an INC mobilization of this scale.

The Metropolitan Manila Development Authority was caught flatfooted. “We didn’t expect it to be this huge,” its chairman said. Buses occupied portions of EDSA, blocking the busway. Several arrests were made after tensions flared with police. And INC spokesman Edwil Zabala delivered a statement that was brief, precise, and lethal in its implications, that what the administration plans to jail Marcoleta will be an injustice they will not stop protesting against.

This was not a scheduled mass action. This was a thunderclap, the INC’s way of telling Remulla, and the one pulling his strings — President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. — that they had crossed a line.

(more…)