Trillanes wants AMLC to probe ‘his alleged’ offshore accounts

MANILA — “Categorically” declaring he does not own “even a single offshore account,” Sen.Antonio Trillanes IV said yesterday he will issue a waiver of bank secrecy to allow the Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) to check the supposed accounts spread in at least three countries that President Rodrigo Duterte claims he owns.

The senator said he can even “invite a fact-finding team of the Office of the Ombudsman, and kung may media na kasama, pupunta kami sa isang bangko at magwo-walk in. At titignan…kung may account ako or hindi [and if there are mediamen available, we could all walk into a bank and check if I indeed have an account or not].” Trillanes said, in an interview with radio DZBB, that he would go the extra mile to prove that Duterte’s allegations, unleashed in a speech at the Mindanao Business Conference late Saturday, are all “lies.”

The President had said that in the next few days he will release full details of Trillanes’ supposed secret wealth stashed in accounts in China, Australia and the US, among others, to prove the senator is a hypocrite who denounces corruption but has dirty hands himself.

Duterte made the remarks two days after his chief critic used a Senate Blue Ribbon hearing on corruption at Customs and the P6.4-billion shabu smuggling to air his latest attacks on the First Family. Trillanes told the Blue Ribbon he had “intelligence from a foreign country” that Davao Vice Mayor Paolo Duterte, the President’s eldest son, was a member of a Chinese Triad, and this accounts for the ease with which shabu is easily entering the Philippines.