MANILA, Philippines—Vital documents that would help prosecute businessman Faustino Chingkoe in the multibillion-peso tax credit certificate (TCC) scam are not missing but are in the safe in Special Prosecutor Dennis Villa-Ignacio’s office, according to Chingkoe’s brother and the star witness against him, Felix Chingkoe.

In a letter to Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez dated Sept. 30, Felix’s lawyer Jose Gonzales said his client recalled seeing Villa-Ignacio place the original copies of his affidavit and immunity agreement in a safe in his office in June 2004 after a press conference announcing Felix Chingkoe’s immunity in the case.

Chingkoe also remembered Villa-Ignacio saying the documents were “important papers” so he was keeping them in the safe, Gonzales said.

Felix’s brother Faustino and ranking officials of the Department of Finance were slapped with a string of graft cases in 2004 following a post-audit report in the mid-1990s showing that several textile companies allegedly defrauded the government of P5.3 billion by using fraudulent TCCs.

Of these, 10 of the companies were owned by Faustino and they allegedly accounted for P2.5-billion of the questionable TCCs.

A TCC serves as proof of a company’s claim for tax credits, which are given to export firms that are entitled to duty-free privileges or to those that have tax refunds coming.

Last month, Ombudsman Bureau Director John Turalba and Assistant Special Prosecutor Rabendranath Uy accused Villa-Ignacio of withholding the documents that are vital to winning the tax fraud case against Faustino and the DOF officials.

What documents?

The two also alleged Villa-Ignacio prohibited them from getting or reading copies of the documents.

Villa-Ignacio, however, has denied having the vital papers in his possession.

To allow the government to proceed with the case, Gonzales informed the Ombudsman that Felix Chingkoe and his wife, Rosita, had agreed to provide the prosecution with photocopies of the “missing” documents.

“We can only offer photocopies of the documents considering the original documents are in the custody of the Office of the Special Prosecutor,” Gonzales wrote Gutierrez.

Earlier, Villa-Ignacio wrote Overall Deputy Ombudsman Orlando Casimiro saying the evidence and court records of the tax credit case were the responsibility of the prosecutors, including Turalba and Uy.

“While [I] was tasked to monitor, supervise and coordinate the tax credit scam cases… [I] was not involved in the actual trial of these cases before various divisions of the Sandiganbayan,” Villa-Ignacio said.