A member of Vice President Sara Duterte’s legal team walked back the way he brought former Vice President Jejomar Binay into the impeachment proceedings, telling reporters on Tuesday, August 4, that he never meant to pull the elder statesman into the controversy over confidential funds.
“I have to apologize if I offended anyone from VP Binay’s camp. I didn’t want to drag his name into this,” Atty. Michael Poa said following the day’s hearing at the Senate.
Poa’s explanation traces back to his cross-examination of former Commission on Audit witness Roderick Wamil, who had testified that Duterte was the only vice president whose confidential fund spending he reviewed during his years at COA’s Intelligence and Confidential Funds Audit Office. That office covered such audits from September 2014 through February 2024, according to Wamil’s account before the court.
To push back on that claim, the defense produced a Department of Budget and Management record from 2014 indicating the Office of the Vice President held confidential and intelligence allocations amounting to P6 million that fiscal year, at a time when Binay occupied the post. Poa noted that his side only obtained the document after Wamil gave his testimony earlier in the week.
The lawyer said his purpose was narrow. He wanted the record to reflect that the vice presidency had been granted secret funds before Duterte’s term, a point he felt had been distorted online. “I just wanted to put that on the record because there have already been many posts on social media claiming that Vice President Sara Duterte was the only vice president to have been allotted confidential funds,” Poa told the court.
By his own account, he had deliberately avoided naming Binay when he first raised the matter, wanting only to establish that an earlier occupant of the office had received the same category of funding. He also framed Wamil’s statement as a matter of scope rather than contradiction, explaining that the auditor testified about Duterte alone because she was the sitting vice president with an active appropriation during the relevant period.
Wamil’s appearance formed part of the prosecution’s case on the first article of impeachment, which centers on the alleged misuse of P612.5 million in confidential funds tied to the OVP and the Department of Education, both of which Duterte led. The former auditor was set to return to the witness stand on August 5 to take questions from the senator-judges.
