Analyst: VP Sara didn’t declare P817-million wealth

MANILA, Philippines — Vice President Sara Duterte had a whopping P817 million in alleged undeclared assets and unexplained wealth in the first four years since taking office in 2022, a forensic financial analyst testified during her impeachment trial on Friday.

The amount included over P207 million she and her husband, Manases Carpio, allegedly held in various bank accounts from 2022 to 2025 that were unreported, according to lawyer and accountant Alexander Cabrera.

He presented the Senate impeachment court a tabulation of alleged undeclared assets, which include undeclared cash and other personal and real properties, alongside computed undeclared income of the Vice President and her husband, their undeclared income from two companies—Cale 88 and Metro City—and computed undeclared income from GenCorp.

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By Cabrera’s reckoning, the couple’s total unexplained wealth from 2022 to to 2025 was P817,874,867-P190,628,012 (2022), P167,337,227 (2023), P264,217,123 (2024), P195,692,505 (2025).

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READ: ‘Gap’ between VP’s SALN, tax records shown in impeachment trial

He said their undeclared bank accounts were P60,214,776 for 2022, P80,701,151 for 2023, P23,169,077 for 2024 and P43,611,929 for 2025.

These amounts of total unexplained wealth of the couple compare with the Vice President’s total assets declared in her statement of assets, liabilities and net worth (SALN)–P70,808,841 (2022), P80,058,841 (2023), P98,452,370 (2024) and P122,797,727.20 (2025).

Cabrera’s testimony was offered by the House prosecution panel to tie together and present the “bigger picture” for Article II of the Articles of Impeachment.

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Expert credentials

Article II alleges that Duterte amassed unexplained wealth; did not fully or truthfully declare all her SALN; and did not divest her business interests when she became Vice President.

Cabrera was presented by House prosecutor and Mamamayang Liberal Rep. Jose Manuel “Chel” Diokno as an expert witness. He finished law at the Ateneo Law School in 1994, completed management training at Harvard Business School and was a certified public accountant before he practiced law.

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He is a member of the Standing Committee on Higher Education of the Second Congressional Commission on Education, chair of the Justice Reform Initiative and the Armed Forces of the Philippines Multisectoral Governance Committee and the former chair of the Integrity Initiative.

Cabrera said that he was able to arrive at the amounts of assets and unexplained wealth from the documents provided by the House prosecution panel, checking the “ending balances” from their bank accounts against the SALN of the Vice President.

Assets conjugal

He noted that Duterte and her husband were married in 2007, which meant that they were covered by the Family Code. Since they had no prenuptial agreement, or judicial decree of separation of property, the couple’s marriage was governed by “absolute community of property” where their assets are considered conjugal.

Based on his findings, Cabrera said that he had reached several conclusions regarding the actions of the Vice President, including that she had violated the Constitution and a number of laws, such as the Internal Revenue Code and the antigraft act.

He said that her 2022-2025 SALNs were “untruthful” and that “substantial amounts” of assets were unreported; Duterte continued to participate in various businesses; the amount of unexplained wealth that he cited was only based on a “limited” number of documents, indicating that the total could be more.

One of Duterte’s lawyers, Kristine Ferrer, objected to Diokno’s frequent reference to “undeclared assets,” noting that this had not yet been proven as facts and were still subject to cross examination, requesting that the word “alleged” be attached to the term.

But the House prosecutor pushed back, saying, “I don’t think the defense can dictate what words would come out of my mouth.”

Impeachment court presiding officer, Senator-judge Francis “Chiz” Escudero, overruled Ferrer, “but on a different ground.”

He said that Diokno merely described the amounts as “undeclared” according to the items in the table or the tabulated summary presented by Cabrera, who will be subjected to cross-examination on Monday.

Toward the end of his testimony, Diokno asked Cabrera about what integrity had to do with his financial review of the Vice President’s alleged unexplained wealth.

‘Paying taxes hurts’

In response, he said: “Following the law is one way to show your integrity. Following the law has a cost, just like taxes, which are very clear costs.”

“Paying taxes hurts, but many of us pay taxes because we have to and paying taxes shows integrity. Integrity has a cost,” Cabrera added.

Integrity Initiative, an organization of business groups and corporations which he led in 2021-2022, seeks to promote integrity and ethics in the business sector.

The House prosecution panel’s final witness for Article II said that the purchase of a manager’s check was a form of “tinikling” as it was used to temporarily remove a certain amount of funds from the year-end balance from a bank account.

Tinikling is a popular traditional Filipino dance where dancers avoid being pinned by a pair of bamboo poles, skipping just in time before these slam against their feet or legs.

The reference was to manager’s checks issued from the joint Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) account of the Vice President and her father, former President Rodrigo Duterte.

“The reason I used the term tinikling is that the funds do not get tied up at year-end. It moves out and returns, moving back and forth, yet it is consistently absent from the year-end balances,” Cabrera said.

The Dutertes allegedly used manager’s checks to keep tens of millions of pesos from appearing in the year-end balance of their BPI account. The amount in a manager’s check remains afloat for a maximum six months before it is eventually returned to the account.

“They do not deposit this,” Cabrera said. “They wait until it becomes stale so that the cash could be returned to their account. So, the amount might be there during the year, but by the end of the year, it isn’t there anymore.”

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He said that this was an “unusual banking behavior” because aside from the tinikling, the money in the manager’s check doesn’t carry any interest. —With a report from Zacarian Sarao