Freedom in the Philippines is in doubt under the current administration, Davao City Mayor Sebastian “Baste” Duterte argued Saturday, pointing to the detention of Senator Rodante Marcoleta as evidence of what he described as unchecked presidential power.
Addressing PDP-Laban’s National Assembly in Davao City, where he sits as the party’s national president, Duterte framed Marcoleta’s jailing as a warning about how far President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is willing to go against political opponents.
“The President can threaten anyone. Tingnan niyo. Walang natitira. Isa nating senador, kinulong nila. Just because [Senator Rodante Marcoleta] wants to open the Blue Ribbon Committee on flood control, anong ginawa sa kanya?” he told party members.
“Do we even have freedom at all, at this point, dito sa bansa natin?” he added.
The senator whose case Duterte cited had appeared before the Sandiganbayan’s Third Division days earlier. On Wednesday, July 22, 2026, Marcoleta rejected the accusations against him, entering not-guilty pleas to plunder and to a violation of Presidential Decree 46, a statute that bars public officials from accepting gifts and private parties from extending them.
Businessman Joseph Espiritu, named as a co-accused, likewise denied wrongdoing during the same proceeding, according to reporting from GMA News and the Philippine Star. The arraignment moved forward after the senator’s legal team dropped an earlier bid to have the plunder charge thrown out, a decision Marcoleta told the court he reached voluntarily and without coercion, as read into the record by Associate Justice Karl Miranda.
Prosecutors from the Office of the Ombudsman have anchored the plunder allegation on a claim that Marcoleta pocketed P75 million in contributions during his 2025 senatorial run without listing the money in his Statement of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth or his campaign finance filings. That sum, per the Ombudsman, arrived as three separate cash donations.
The gift-law exposure extends beyond a single courtroom. Marcoleta is answering to three counts of violating PD 46 spread across the anti-graft court’s Third, Fourth and First Divisions, with different alleged donors tied to each — Espiritu, former congressman Michael Defensor, and businessman Aristotle Viray.
Duterte’s remarks landed as his party gathered in his home city, with the mayor casting the prosecutions of Marcoleta and other administration critics as politically driven rather than rooted in the law.
