An individual who lived only two months before dying in 1965 turned up as a signatory on liquidation documents for Vice President Sara Duterte’s confidential funds, a government statistician told the Senate impeachment court on Monday, September 07, 2026.
The finding came from Marizza Grande, Assistant National Statistician at the Philippine Statistics Authority, who appeared as the prosecution’s witness on the 22nd hearing day. Grande’s office had been asked by the House to run 2,669 names against the civil registry. Those names came from acknowledgment receipts that the Office of the Vice President and the Department of Education filed to account for how P612.5 million in confidential money was spent across 2022 and 2023.
The youngest match her team recovered belonged to Marlin Sunga, an infant whose records showed both a 1965 birth and a death that same year, on November 2. Describing what the death certificate revealed, Grande testified: “Based po kasi sa death certificate po niya, two months pa lang ay namatay na po siya.”
Grande was careful about the limits of what she could assert. The records were the PSA’s own, she noted, and she could not declare with certainty that the people identified were in fact the ones who received the funds. Rappler reported that of the full list, only 152 names produced a single, unique match in the registry system.
Beyond the Sunga entry, the verification pointed to a broader pattern. Grande said 37 of the listed payees already had death records by the time the 2023 disbursements supposedly reached them. Another 25 names carried birthdates showing they were minors, some registered as under 16.
Prosecutors used the day to walk through several specific receipts. According to reporting by GMA News, private prosecutor Mae Divinagracia entered documents tied to Fortunato Salig for P200,000, Emilio Sagan for P70,000, and Rodolfo Traya for P120,000, all dated 2023, and Grande confirmed death certificates existed for each — filed in 2011, 2015, and 2021 respectively.
The dispute over the funds sits within Article I of the impeachment case, which centers on how Duterte handled roughly P500 million as vice president and P112.5 million during her tenure leading the education department. Duterte’s lawyers have pushed back on the statistical evidence, with defense counsel Justin Nicol Gular arguing during the hearing that the witness was not competent to speak to the signatures in question and reserving the defense’s challenges for cross-examination.
