Believed by morons, spread by Marcos congressmen and media mercenaries
First of three parts
THE claim by politicians like Gerville Luistro, Joel Chua and David Suarez that bank records provided by the Anti-Money Laundering Council make up a “smoking gun” proving Vice President Sara Duterte’s alleged unexplained wealth is total rubbish, believed only by morons, repeated by intellectually lazy journalists and spread by media mercenaries.
Let’s take it step by step. The usual headline — and propaganda spin — after AMLC Executive Director Ronel Buenaventura gave a report last week to the House of Representatives Justice Committee was that Sara and her lawyer-husband had “bank transactions” from 2006 to 2026 amounting to P6.7 billion. Internet-only website Rappler’s report was worse: that these P6.7 billion were “suspicious transactions.”
The number is intended for propaganda impact. It creates the impression of hidden wealth, of wrongdoing, of corruption on a scale that demands outrage. It is the kind of figure that shuts down thinking and replaces it with reaction. This leaves gullible readers, or just those who do not bother to study issues, morons, or political mercenaries to claim, as Rep. Joel Chua did: “The truth has been revealed, our vice president is a billionaire.”
I can’t believe that Chua, a lawyer and politician from the country’s richest city, is so poor that he doesn’t have a bank account that he doesn’t understand what bank “transactions” are, which is information that banks report to the AMLC.
All Chua had to do if he were sincere in finding out the truth, and not merely following Marcos’ directive to get Sara impeached, was to look at one of his many bank accounts. He would find three columns: “Withdrawal/Debit, “Deposit/Credit” and the ”Balance,” or the credit items less the debit. The AMLC gave only the debit and credit columns, without the balance, which makes me suspect that this was intentional on its part to portray Sara as a billionaire.
Billionaire
If Chua made P2 million per month on the average in the past 21 years (the number of years for which the AMLC reported Sara and her husband’s transactions), he would have P4 million reported as his “bank transactions” monthly: the P2 million deposited to his account and P2 million in transactions withdrawing these for his expenses. For one year, therefore, Chua would have P48 million in transactions, and P12 billion after 21 years: You’re also a billionaire, congressman Chua, richer than Sara with her P3 billion.
But if Chua had such expensive vices, he would likely have instead a zero balance by the end of one year, which would make him a pauper and report it as such in his statement of assets, liabilities and net worth (SALN) for those years.
In the case of Sara, the AMLC report claimed P3.9 billion in transactions from 2005 to 2026. About P1.3 billion of these were debits (outflows) and P1.4 billion in credits (inflows), leaving her with a P100 million balance, which is the neighborhood of her reported net worth in her SALN — P71.6 million in 2022; P77.5 million in 2023 and P88.5 million in 2024. It was just so moronic at the hearing for party-list Rep. Terry Ridon to interrupt the reading of Sara’s bank transactions per year in order to emphasize that she had a much lower net worth. SALN and the total of bank transactions are totally different animals.
Playbook
What gets my goat is that those mercenary politicians again had to employ this kind of propaganda trick which is from the old, exposed playbook of the Aquino III regime in 2012, to portray the late Chief Justice Renato Corona as having $12 million in dollar accounts. A Filipino term expresses well what they are doing: (“Bulok, lumang estilo na, ginagamit pa”).
The then Ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales claimed at the Senate impeachment court that AMLC records showed that Corona had millions of dollars in bank transactions in unexplained wealth that he was hiding. Morales misled the court, as the AMLC is doing now in the case of Sara.
Morales presented records of dollar accounts that she said reached as much as $12 million. These, however, were the gross transaction flows — deposits, withdrawals and movements within accounts — and these items totaled for 20 years, just as is being done in Sara’s case. As any banker will explain, the total of transactions passing through an account is not the same as the balance of that account. Money moves in and out. It is transferred, redeployed, reinvested. To add up those flows and present them as if they were accumulated wealth is moronic. Corona’s actual bank balance was one-tenth of what Morales told the Senate impeachment court was $12 million.
I was the only columnist to have exposed Morales’ fallacy (“Colossal deception on Corona’s accounts,” May 17, 2012), which came out a day after her lying presentation at the Senate. Although my column went viral in the internet, it wasn’t followed up by any other media — which convinced me they were either on Aquino III’s payroll or too embarrassed to correct their false reportage.
Incorrect
One reporter though, Daxim Lucas of the Inquirer, followed up my column by getting bankers’ views on my claims. Lucas reported:
“Bankers Thursday described as ‘plausible’ the explanation posited by Inquirer columnist Rigoberto Tiglao who defended Chief Justice Renato Corona from allegations of having amassed some $12 million in as many as 82 bank accounts.
“The bankers — speaking to the Inquirer on condition that they don’t be identified because of the political nature of the topic — uniformly said that an estimate of the Supreme Court chief’s bank account balances made by adding up all transaction values over time would be incorrect.”
The article though was buried in the inside pages: After all, the Inquirer had run screaming banner stories asserting Morales’ false claims, as well as other lies about Corona. Media didn’t bother to publish my narration of how Morales had practically lied.
It was one of the many lies the Aquino III government spread to falsely portray Corona as a corrupt chief justice who should be removed. These lies were merely the “air cover” to conceal what was really happening below the hood: Aquino bribed the senators with about P200 million each in pork-barrel type of funds the use of which they had the discretion to direct, disguised as the so-called Disbursement Acceleration Program funds. The congressmen now trying to get Sara impeached should re-think their positions: There isn’t, so far, enough bribe money now.
How could the House Justice Committee members now have the gall to employ the same trick used in Corona’s impeachment, and still expect this to succeed?
Hoax
First of all, they may be ignorant of the hoax that the former Ombudsman Morales pulled off as this was not widely reported by media, with the Aquino III government succeeding in disseminating the lie that Corona was removed because of unexplained wealth discovered in his bank deposits. They assumed that that propaganda trick worked, and therefore could be done to portray Sara as corrupt.
Second is the fact that at least half of Filipinos don’t have bank accounts, and therefore would not know what “bank transactions” are, and therefore could be easily fooled that Sara’s P3.7 billion total “bank transactions” in 21 years meant she had that much money somewhere. Indeed, it is surprising — or not given their lower salaries — that even media people, including a Pink Philippine Star columnist who made tons of money during former president Joseph Estrada’s term — did not seem to understand these financial terms, and just disseminated the lies spread by the House Justice Committee, claiming stupidly that it was the “smoking gun” of Sara’s unexplained wealth.
Language also plays a big role, with more than two-thirds of Filipinos getting their information from Filipino-language tabloids and broadcast-media. In Filipino, “transaction” is translated as “transaksyon” which means solely the process of getting revenue. The headlines of Sara being reported as having billions in “bank transactions” in Filipino would be translated as meaning that she got that much in revenues, not that she both had revenues and expenses.
The third reason is that media has been lazy to study the House Justice Committee’s claims, read the actual AMLC document, or are too stupid to understand what it really means. The extent to which media lied about the AMLC report is so shocking I can only conclude many have been compromised in Marcos’ desperate attempt to stop Sara from being elected to the presidency in 2028.
Propaganda
Many headlines simply followed the line laid down by the government propaganda unit, the Philippine News Agency: “AMLC confirms suspicious transactions made by Sara Duterte.”
This is patently false. The AMLC did not confirm that Sara or her husband Manases had transactions that are linked to corruption or any crime. When the AMLC categorizes a transaction as “suspicious,” it merely means there are reports — valid or not — for it to be investigated. In the case of the “29 suspicious transactions” out of Sara’s 417 transactions, the AMLC found no crime involved. This is implied in its table listing the categories of the transactions and amount involved for each, that for “suspicious transactions” involved P1.00. That’s not a typo, the AMLC found a peso as the amount in suspicious transactions. Similarly, the “17 suspicious accounts” out of her husband Manases’ 403 transactions also involved P1.
This also points to the most shameless and extremely false reportage on the AMLC claims made by Rappler, which confirms its US-inspired hatred of the Dutertes:
“A total of P6.77 billion in large and suspicious transactions flowed through the bank accounts of Vice President Sara Duterte and her husband, Mans Carpio, from 2006 to 2025.”
This is a blatant lie that Rappler should be ashamed of making. Nowhere in the AMLC report was it claimed that the Duterte-Carpio couple had P6.77 billion in “suspicious transactions,” but only P1 — the AMLC’s strange accounting protocol to indicate no such suspicious transactions were found.
Note: Read the actual AMLC “report” in rigobertotiglao.com, annexed in this column’s internet edition.
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
X: @bobitiglao
Website: www.rigobertotiglao.com
The post Believed by morons, spread by Marcos congressmen and media mercenaries first appeared on Rigoberto Tiglao.
Believed by morons, spread by Marcos congressmen and media mercenaries
Source: Breaking News PH
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