Philippines president ‘must show accounts’

Opposition says he should disprove money allegations

MANILA // An opposition senator pressed Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte yesterday to release details of his bank accounts to the public to disprove allegations that he had large sums of undeclared money.

Senator Antonio Trillanes IV first alleged Mr Duterte had unexplained wealth during the presidential campaign last year.

He said he was raising the issue again because Mr Duterte has not yet released details of the more than 2 billion Philippine pesos he allegedly kept in bank accounts as a former city mayor. Mr Trillanes, one of Mr Duterte’s harshest critics and a navy officer once detained for a failed coup plot against a former president, said that he would resign if Mr Duterte could disprove the allegations.

Presidential spokesman Ernesto Abella said Mr Duterte would not release those bank details “in response to grandstanding” but suggested the president may do so as part of a legal process.

Mr Duterte, who took office in June, has denied amassing ill-gotten wealth.

“I know he will not release and he will not accept my challenge because it will be proven that he is really a corrupt official,” Mr Trillanes said.

During the campaign in May, Mr Trillanes released documents he said were handed to him by a concerned citizen purportedly showing 2.4 billion pesos (Dh176.4 million) flowed into Mr Duterte’s bank accounts between 2006 and 2015, representing alleged unexplained wealth the mayor failed to declare as required by law. Mr Trillanes and Mr Duterte’s lawyer then went to a branch of the Bank of the Philippines Islands, where Mr Duterte and his daughter allegedly had an undeclared deposit of more than 200 million pesos in a joint account. Lawyer Salvador Panelo said that Mr Duterte had authorised him to request the bank to open the account but that bank officials told him it would take seven days to study the request. Mr Trillanes said the account has not been opened to scrutiny. Mr Duterte has projected himself as a politician who rose from poverty and still lives a modest life in a rundown house in southern Davao city, where he was previously mayor.

He has faced criticism for his violent campaign against illegal drugs in which thousands of mostly poor suspected drug users have been killed.