INQUIRER/ MARIANNE BERMUDEZ
The plunder complaint of Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV against President Duterte remains under investigation despite his presidential immunity from suit, Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales said on Friday night.
“As I said before, it is undergoing investigation,” Morales told reporters, after she delivered a scathing speech on these “trying times” at the University of the Philippines College of Law alumni homecoming.
Trillanes on May 5 accused Duterte of hiring 11,000 ghost employees at the Davao City Hall when he was mayor in 2014. Citing a Commission on Audit report, he said that the city spent P708 million on the contractuals’ salaries even if there were no documents to prove that they actually rendered work.
He said the alleged hiring of ghost employees may well be the source of Duterte’s alleged hidden wealth, and an investigation by the Ombudsman would reveal things.
Morales pointed out that Trillanes’ complaints were filed before Duterte handily won during the May 9 elections. She cited this as a reason why an investigation can still be pursued even with his presidential immunity against suit.
“At the time the case was filed, he was not yet President,” Morales said. “See, under the law, even if a person has immunity or even if he’s impeachable, you still continue the investigation for purposes of determining whether there is misconduct.”
Morales raised the possibility that if investigators found liability on his part, “there could be a basis for impeachment, if it amounts to the grounds of impeachment under the Constitution.”
Yet, she stressed that she had already inhibited herself from the case because of her relation to Duterte. Morales is the sister of Lucas Carpio Jr., the husband of Court of Appeals Justice Agnes Reyes Carpio. This makes her the aunt of Mans Carpio, the husband of Duterte’s daughter, Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte.
When asked about the possibility of Duterte being probed for the spate of extrajudicial killings that characterized his government’s bloody antinarcotics campaign, Morales said she is not ruling it out: “Everything is possible.”
“We don’t discount any possibility that we’ll spare him or indict him. There are many possibilities,” she said.
Duterte had won popular support for promising to end the drug problem within the first six months of his administration. After a spate of alleged vigilante killings and police excesses left nearly 5,000 people dead in its wake, he later admitted that he needed to extend his antinarcotics campaign.
Morales was speaking with reporters after delivering a hard-hitting speech at the UP College of Law alumni homecoming in Makati Shangri-la Hotel.
She opposed “blind loyalty” by the public and said that “the people should be bothered when the leaders themselves equally could not figure out what is right and wrong.”/rga