What is obscured in the ongoing impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte is not the question of her guilt, but how she came to have so much in confidential funds.
The first ₱125 million in confidential funds reached the Office of the Vice President in December 2022 by presidential discretion, not congressional vote. It was released from Malacañang’s contingent fund weeks after the UniTeam victory inauguration. The ₱500 million that followed in 2023 went through the regular budgetary process. It was deliberated and approved in bicam, significantly the first confidential fund of that size ever granted to any vice president. As COA’s own auditor testified on Monday, Duterte’s predecessors Jejomar Binay and Leni Robredo had none.
This is not an argument for her defense. Inadequate liquidation and an 11-day spending spree remain properly within the impeachment court’s jurisdiction and should be pursued to its conclusion. This is only to point out the unsettling fact that the same chamber that approved unprecedented huge funding, while the alliance that requested it was still intact, is now prosecuting its use. The tangential, albeit important, matter is not just how the money was spent or misspent, but also why it was given to the VP in the first place when the UniTeam was still intact, and denied after the alliance collapsed.
This is a conversation that requires no impeachment court. Its absence is the unspoken scandal in the shadow of the ongoing trial.
The court will rule on the evidence before it, as it should, but the public deserves to notice. Selective accountability is still accountability, arriving too late to matter.
