[Vantage Point] Follow VP Sara’s money, not her alibis

Vice President Sara Duterte’s denial of franchise ownership leaves the central questions unanswered: why Gencorp paid her more than P2.14 million, what financial interest she retained, and how that interest fits with the company’s government contracts. Her explanations must withstand scrutiny against the records. 

Leaving a politician’s name off a shareholder list does not make corporate checks cut in their favor any less suspect. 

In Vice President Sara Duterte’s impeachment trial, the defense panel’s own explanation for payments coming out of GenCorp Industries Inc. creates a contradiction no amount of legal hair-splitting can smooth over: if she owned no shares, held no office, and had no hand in the company, what financial right entitled her to pocket more than P2.14 million of its cash? 

Duterte’s public response makes that question harder to dismiss. In October, she denied owning a Jollibee franchise and accused Rappler of disinformation. But her statement also acknowledged a previous investment in a company within a legitimate business organization. Her denial concerned direct franchise ownership; it did not establish that she had extinguished every financial interest connected to the business. 

There is a valid corporate principle here. Shareholders do not personally own a corporation’s individual properties or contracts; the corporation has a separate legal personality. 

Must Read Bida ang saya: Is your fave Jollibee spot owned by Sara Duterte?

Duterte could therefore distinguish an investment in a company from personal ownership of its franchises. But that distinction cannot answer the separate question of whether she retained a financial interest relevant to constitutional restrictions on the Vice President.

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At the Wednesday, November 11 hearing, Gencorp counsel Suzette Balucanag-Punay testified that Duterte was neither a shareholder nor a corporate officer from 2022 to 2025.

She nevertheless acknowledged disbursements totaling P2,142,369.14: P337,500 in 2022, P555,750 in 2023, P612,419.14 in 2024 and P636,700 in 2025. Duterte’s Statements of Assets Liabilities and Net Worth (SALNs) also identified Gencorp, or the related company names appearing in earlier declarations, as business interests. The payment explanation and sworn disclosures require reconciliation with the corporate records.

Attacking Rappler does not perform that reconciliation. Rappler defended its reporting by citing Duterte’s SALNs and the prosecution expert’s testimony. Every disputed assertion remains open to scrutiny, including the expert’s assumptions. But criticism of the messenger cannot explain the financial entitlement described by the defense’s own witness. Duterte’s response needs investment records, not merely objections to how a headline characterizes ownership. 

The defense’s magic phrase for this arrangement is “loose investment,” which supplies no recognized accounting classification. Money placed in a business may represent equity, a loan, an advance, or another contractual entitlement. The arrangement can be informal, but the company must still explain how it recorded the obligation and calculated the payments. Calling the investment loose does not loosen the obligation to account for it. 

The origin story makes the math even shakier. According to Balucanag-Punay, Duterte originally put P46,875 into Davao Bounty Foods Corporation in 2007 for a Jollibee franchise that never materialized, and that money was quietly rolled over across successor firms until it landed in Gencorp’s Times Square branch. 

Yet when pressed by senator-judges and prosecutors, the company’s own lawyer admitted she had no records proving the original amount invested, no agreements documenting the rollover, and no formula showing how the payouts were computed.

As Senate Impeachment Court Presiding Officer Francis Escudero pointed out, receiving P2.14 million off a documented P46,875 contribution amounts to roughly 45 times the original stake. Under cross-examination by private prosecutor Lorna Kapunan, Balucanag-Punay eventually conceded that whether labeled a return of investment or a return on investment, the sum constituted income — and even admitted she had questioned the payouts herself. Without an opening ledger showing principal in and repayments out, “return of capital” is just a convenient label slapped onto unexplained cash. 

Credibility problem

What turns a messy private ledger into a full-blown constitutional problem is public money. Testimony from PhilGEPS division chief Rendell Sopeña shows that between July 2022 and June 2026, Gencorp bagged 49 government contracts worth P35.88 million. 

More than 95% of that money — roughly P34.22 million across 15 awards in PhilGEPS records, though Mayor Sebastian “Baste” Duterte later testified the city’s total transactions with Gencorp reached P33.2 million across 19 contracts — came straight from Davao City Hall, with 11 of the PhilGEPS-listed deals awarded through negotiated small-value procurement rather than open competitive bidding. 

Must Read Sara Duterte’s company won millions’ worth of contracts from Davao City Hall

Mayor Duterte insists he had no idea his sister had ties to the firm, while Gencorp’s counsel claims the city contracts went to a different branch and involved no intervention from the Vice President. 

Those excuses miss the point of the 1987 Constitution. Article VII, Section 13 does not ask whether the Vice President personally called up a bids and awards committee or attended a board meeting. It flatly prohibits her from participating directly or indirectly in any business and from holding any financial interest in a government contract during her tenure. 

A corporation is a single legal entity, not a collection of firewall-protected fast-food counters. While she was collecting annual checks from Gencorp, Gencorp was collecting tens of millions of pesos from City Hall run by her brother. (READ: Who is Tristan Domingo, the Davao official behind contracts awarded to Duterte’s company?)

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To be fair, the prosecution cannot afford to get sloppy either. Its forensic expert’s claim attributing more than P212 million in Gencorp deposits to Duterte rests on a disputed 20% ownership figure, and corporate gross receipts are not personal income. 

Overreaching on unverified numbers only gives the defense an easy target to knock down while distracting from the facts already on the record — including the separate admission that Duterte remained on the books as a director and compensation committee member of Metro City Chow Foods during her vice presidency, even though the company’s bylaws do not provide for such a committee. 

We do not need inflated projections to see where the paper trail leads. Until Vice President Duterte and Gencorp lay the original investment agreements, the accounting ledgers, the check vouchers, and the Davao City procurement files on the table, the claim that she walks away from this unblemished is not a defense.

It is an insult to basic arithmetic. – Rappler.com

(Note: This column has been updated to correct the calculations and clarify the figures discussed. The revisions distinguish corporate receipts from personal income and do not alter the central questions raised about the Vice President’s financial interests.)

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