(UPDATED – 6:28 p.m.) MANILA, Philippines — President Rodrigo Duterte has a new allegation against one of his staunchest critics: Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV has a mistress working at the Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC), who gave the lawmaker a copy of the chief executive’s bank records.
“Pagbukas ng account ko, binigay kay Trillanes, si Abad who is the mistress of Nograles, eh Trillanes. Mistress ‘yan siya ni Trillanes ‘yang Abad na ‘yan, then gave it to Trillanes and computed it (on) a daily basis,” Duterte said during a media briefing at the Palace on Wednesday, Oct. 4.
[After opening my account, Abad, who is the mistress of Trillanes, gave it to him and computed it on a daily basis.]
It wasn’t clear if the President was referring to AMLC executive director Julia Bacay-Abad, who resigned last January and was replaced by Mel Georgie Racela.
During his privilege speech at the Senate last Tuesday, Trillanes claimed he had unearthed Duterte’s alleged bank transactions amounting to over P2.2 billion, covering the period September 2006 to December 2015.
The senator’s disclosure was a reiteration of his allegation in the plunder complaint against Duterte that he had filed in May 2016 days after the national polls, which is now being investigated by the Office of the Ombudsman.
In his complaint, Trillanes claimed Duterte could have amassed his alleged hidden wealth from hiring thousands of Davao City ghost employees.
He cited in his complaint the Commission on Audit’s 2015 report that there were 11,246 contractual workers in 2014, who were paid a total of P708 million and assigned to the office of the Davao mayor. The COA raised concern over the absence of documents proving that the said workers were actually performing their jobs.
On Sept. 28, a statement from the AMLC said Trillanes’ allegations about Duterte’s supposed total bank transactions, which the senator attached in his 2016 complaint, were erroneous.
“Suffice it to state that in the attachment to the complaint, the alleged debits and credits representing outflows and inflows of funds were added together, thus, the resulting total amounts are wrong and misleading,” the council said.
Also, according to presidential legal counsel Salvador Panelo, the alleged amount “was based on in-and-out bank transactions of the President’s family through the years; hence, does not sufficiently prove he accumulated money in the total of P1 billion at any given time.”
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