AMLC/justice committee boo-boo dooms impeachment vs VP Sara
Second of three parts
THE House justice committee chairman Gerville Luistro and her gang thought their scheme to get the Anti-Money Laundering Council’s new, witless executive director to disclose Vice President Sara Duterte and her husband’s bank accounts would deliver the coup de grâce in their push for her impeachment. Instead, it has turned out to be a colossal blunder, dooming their master Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s desperate plot to prevent Sara from winning the presidency in 2028.
Worse for them, Luistro and her main accomplices — representatives Leila de Lima, Chel Diokno and Percival Cendaña – now face a maximum of eight years in prison and paying as much as P2 million each in penalties for violating three laws on bank secrecy and data privacy when they disclosed the bank details of Sara’s husband Manases Carpio.
Carpio filed relevant criminal complaints against them the other day.
It was careless of Luistro to have jettisoned all her legal education and instead followed the advice of de Lima, Diokno and Cendana who filed the motion to demand the Carpios’ bank transactions from the AMLC. The three aren’t really crusaders for accountability but have dark motivations for pursuing Sara’s impeachment. De Lima’s out for revenge: she spent seven years in detention on charges of conspiracy to commit illegal-drug trafficking, pursued by Sara’s father, Rodrigo, when he was president. Diokno and Cendaña are ideologically or organizationally allied with the Left, which has inexplicably become President Marcos Jr.’s activists.
The Luistro-led gang got the AMLC’s newly appointed executive director Ronel Buenaventura to submit a report to the committee detailing Sara’s bank transactions from 2002 to 2026 as well as those of her husband Manases Carpio. Buenaventura sheepishly or stupidly complied, the first time ever in the AMLC’s 24-year history that its head ignored or was unaware of the law’s emphatic and strict provision that a person’s bank transactions cannot be made public.
In Luistro’ carelessness — or ignorance of the law or utter stupidity, or both — she didn’t even consider treating the AMLC report as confidential, to be read only in executive session to comply with bank secrecy laws. She asked that hard copies be given to the 74 members of the justice committee, many of whom distributed the copies of their copy to the press — broadcasting to the entire nation information that our laws emphasize are strictly confidential.
This is a cut-and-dried case of violation of the 2001 Data Anti-Money Laundering Law, the 1955 Bank Secrecy Law and the Data Privacy Act. The 2001 law in fact had warned any serious lawmaker against turning AMLC-derived information into political theater.
Confidential
The 2001 law that created the AMLC in its section 9(c) reads:
“Any information relating to the examination of bank deposits and investments shall be kept confidential and may not be disclosed in any manner… except upon order of a competent court.”
A previous section 9(b) provides “No person shall communicate, directly or indirectly, in any manner or by any means, to any person… the fact that a covered or suspicious transaction report was made, the contents thereof, or any information in relation thereto.”
The AMLC executive director gave the committee a report detailing Sara and her husband’s bank transactions from 2006 to 2026, and disclosed, in blatant violation of Section 9(b) that it had investigated (but later cleared) their transactions initially categorized as suspicious.
In their hubris, Luistro and her cabal thought that since former Ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales was able to disclose in 2012 in the Senate impeachment court the late Chief Justice Renato Corona’s dollar account transactions, they could also do so.
They didn’t do their homework. Morales argued in that episode that the Senate was an impeachment court, which she claimed was the “competent court” that the RA 9160 was referring to, since the Constitution says it shall have the “sole power to try and judge all cases of impeachment.” By no stretch of the imagination can the justice committee be considered to be a court. It is a mere committee of Congress tasked to determine if an impeachment complaint is sufficient for it to be referred to the entire House, at least one one-third of whose members would approve it and then ask the Senate to convene as the impeachment court.
Weapon
If Luistro and her gang’s boo-boo is not declared illegal, Congress will become a powerful unjust political weapon: It can concoct a flimsy impeachment complaint, and then order the AMLC to submit the target’s bank records, throwing to the waste basket the country’s bank secrecy laws, a key component of our investment infrastructure.
Morales in 2012 was actually also wrong on this point as the Senate impeachment court had not ordered the AMLC to submit Corona’s accounts. Morales acted on her own, arguing that in the fine print of the SALN law was a provision that automatically waived the bank secrecy laws for persons being investigated by the Ombudsman. Morales was also wrong as she had not been investigating Corona for graft, with the trigger for his impeachment being solely the complaint filed by then-House justice committee chairman Niel Tupas with members Reynaldo Umali and Lorenzo Tañada.
It is amazing that the AMLC executive director Buenaventura, who was appointed to the post only on April 14, readily submitted a report just five working days later, on April 22, on Sara and her husband’s transactions, in clear violation of the banking laws. Didn’t he think to consult experienced AMLC lawyers to give him advice — written to cover his back — on its legality?
The AMLC consists of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas head Eli Remolona as chairman, Insurance Commissioner Reynaldo Regalado, and Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Francis Edralin Lim. Carpio though did not include as respondents the latter two members.
I asked Remolona if the AMLC had approved Buenaventura’s report and its submission to the Congress committee. He didn’t confirm or deny. When I told Remolona that Buenaventura seemed to be so stupid that he gave the committee information which violated the AMLC law itself, he responded with his Alfred E. Neuman what-me-worry grin: “Baka nagta-tangahan lang.” (Maybe he was only pretending to be stupid.) That statement got my conspiratorial mind thinking: Did Remolona or Buenaventura stage this AMLC episode in order to torpedo the impeachment plot?
Indeed it is such an undeniable blunder that it is very unlikely that Marcos’ minions will get the required 100 representatives to vote for the articles of impeachment to be transmitted to the Senate for trial. Impeachment is by essence a political process that depends much on public opinion for its validity. Why would the congressmen support an impeachment complaint based on AMLC findings whose disclosure violated laws, acquired by bungling committee leaders now facing a court case that could end in their being thrown in jail? Most of the congressmen would decide not to risk being involved in the legal entanglement Luistro and several justice committee members find themselves in.
Illegally
Even the House justice committee certainly can’t use the AMLC findings to bolster their agenda to get Sara impeached, as these were acquired illegally, even as the data on Sara’s transactions have been exposed as manipulations (both debits and credits were counted, rather than focusing on the bank balance) designed for black propaganda to portray her as an ill-gotten wealth “billionaire,” rather than establishing evidence.
The result is not the strengthening of a case but its ruin, because impeachment, for all its political character, is still bound by standards of evidence and fairness that cannot be cavalierly brushed aside without consequences.
If the House still manages to push forward Sara’s impeachment, the calculus in the Senate is altogether different. Senators are not mere political actors but jurors in an impeachment trial, and they are acutely sensitive to the institutional risks of associating themselves with a case that reeks of procedural shortcuts and legal vulnerabilities. A hundred congressmen pushing for Sara’s impeachment can still hide in the anonymity of the mob. In contrast, voters won’t forget who among the 24 senators wanted to stop her candidacy.
The anti-Duterte congressmen are indeed panicking over their boo-boo that they are resorting to outright lies about the AMLC report. Rep. Terry Ridon for instance claimed that the AMLC report disclosed that Sara had “billions in financial flows, including a net inflow of P2.88 billion.” Ridon is lying outrightly: the AMLC report (which I posted in rigobertotiglao.com) which covered 21 years of Sara’s transactions said: “A review of the identified inflow transactions shows total inflows of approximately P1.51 billion.” With its report that her bank transactions (inflows and outflow) totaled P3.9 billion, outflows would be P2.4 billion.
Sara therefore didn’t have a net inflow but a net outflow of P902 million, which means she owes that much, hardly indicating that she has unexplained wealth. Or maybe Ridon doesn’t understand what “bank transactions” mean, which makes him out to be something that rhymes with his name.
Atty. Carpio’s complaint is posted as an annex of this column at rigobertotiglao.com.
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AMLC/justice committee boo-boo dooms impeachment vs VP Sara
Source: Breaking News PH
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