Senator Antonio Trillanes IV and Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte. INQUIRER FILE PHOTOS
DAVAO CITY–Mayor Sara Duterte on Friday welcomed the filing of a civil case against opposition Senator Antonio Trillanes IV by her husband, Manases Carpio, saying this “felt good.”
Carpio, and Vice Mayor Paolo Duterte filed the suit before the City Prosecutor’s Office here and the case had been raffled off as of Thursday.
Mayor Sara described Trillanes’ tirades against her family in general as “too much.”
“That’s why I feel good about his move and his actions because I have been telling him at the height of the events that ‘you should not keep quiet,’” Sara recounted telling her husband Carpio to reporters here.
She said she fully supports Manases and Paolo in their quest to have Trillanes answer for his acts.
“They are within their right. I feel that what Trillanes did to them was too much,” the presidential daughter said, adding the senator did not even spare her husband, who is a private person and not a public official.
Among the staunchest critics of the Duterte administration, Trillanes has publicly accused the presidential son Paolo of having a hand in the seized multi-billion peso worth of illegal drugs that had passed through BOC scrutiny. The drug shipment was eventually seized from a warehouse in Valenzuela.
The senator also tagged the Davao City vice mayor as a member of the Chinese organized crime gang, Triad, due to the latter’s supposed Dragon tattoo on his back.
Manases was likewise dragged into the controversy because of his several visits to the BOC.
Both attended the Senate hearing last September, during which, they denied their involvement in the drug smuggling and corruption allegations, calling the senator’s accusations as “baseless.”
During the hearing, Trillanes dared Paolo to show his supposed tattoo, to which the latter declined.
For his part, Manases had said his visits to the BOC were due to his profession as lawyer and that he was representing clients.
But aside from maligning them through other issues, Paolo and Manases also said Trillanes had implicated them in alleged corruption and extortion activities in the operation of ride-sharing pioneer Uber in Central Visayas, as well as at the Road Board and the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH).
For his “false and malicious accusations of purported rampant corruption and extortion activities” against them, Paolo and Manases wanted Trillanes to pay a total of P6.6 million in damages and litigation fees.
Sara said her lawyer-husband informed her before leaving the house on Wednesday that he and Paolo were filing charges against the mutineer-turned-senator.
“I feel that what they did was right,” she said.
Trillanes dismissed the complaint against him as “nothing but another harassment suit because our corrupt and co-opted justice system has become a refuge for the Duterte scoundrels.”
To which the presidential daughter replied: “(Trillanes) harassed my husband, so I guess it was also correct that my husband harasses him (by filing the suit).”
“When someone picks a fight on you, you fight back. Don’t just be silent,” the mayor said, further recounting what she told Manases.
Asked about her reaction on Trillanes’s vow to make as life mission her “murderous and corrupt clan” accountable for its actions, the presidential daughter shot back: “You better be sure also that you’ll be in power forever.”
READ: As his ’life’s mission,’ Trillanes vows to hold Duterte family accountable for acts
“Because if it’s only me who remains in power and you no longer have power anymore, I’ll have you energized by Davao Light,” she said.
The terms of both Mayor Duterte and Senator Trillanes end in 2019. /jpv
RELATED STORY
Inday Sara supports husband, bro in civil suit vs Trillanes