A man currently facing kidnapping charges told a House panel he served as a financial conduit for both former President Rodrigo Duterte and Vice President Sara Duterte — handling cash pickups worth hundreds of millions of pesos and signing off on bank accounts he never personally opened.
Ramil Madriaga, testifying before the House committee on justice during its second scheduled hearing on the impeachment complaints against the Vice President, said associates of the elder Duterte registered at least six bank accounts under his name without his direct involvement in their opening.
“These were opened by people close to PRRD, who informed me that money will be transferred to these accounts for intelligence operation and for laundering,” he told lawmakers, reading from a supplemental affidavit.
Madriaga voluntarily offered to waive bank secrecy over the accounts and signed the waiver before the hearing concluded. He said the list — spanning branches of Chinabank in Makati’s Legaspi Village, Chinabank Main, a Chinabank branch near the Ayala Avenue fire station, a PNB branch along Makati Metropolitan Avenue, and unidentified banks in Pasig City and Lubao, Pampanga — may not be exhaustive.
“However, I have never personally opened these accounts or appeared before the said banks to process any application in relation thereto,” he said.
A Manila court allowed Madriaga to leave detention temporarily to appear before the panel, according to Inquirer.net, which first reported his testimony.
He said he was compensated between P100,000 and P150,000 for his services to the former president. Among the transactions he described were three separate pickups of P100 million each from a bank inside a mall in Lubao, Pampanga — all of which he said were brought to Malacañang.
“On another incident, I was informed by PRRD that the two Landbank managers’ checks, which were to be delivered to one of our safe houses in Eastwood, Quezon City, in the amounts of P84.2 million and P4.8 million, respectively were issued under my name,” he added.
He also recounted being handed an entire checkbook to sign for encashment and said he complied without hesitation out of “complete trust in PRRD and his close allies.”
His attorney, Raymund Palad, said the banking details were not required for the impeachment hearings but were included deliberately. “Precisely, he wants to prove that he became a bagman, to prove his closeness and relationship,” Palad said. “That’s one way of establishing credibility and connection to the Duterte family.”
Madriaga’s primary role in the proceedings is to support the impeachment complaints against the Vice President over her alleged misuse of confidential funds — testimony rooted in a separate affidavit he filed with the Ombudsman in December 2025.
Also contained in his supplemental affidavit was an account of the former president’s alleged designs against former Senator Antonio Trillanes IV, a longtime Duterte critic. Madriaga said the elder Duterte ordered “sabotage operations” targeting Trillanes but stopped short of ordering his killing, wary of the ex-senator’s ties to the military. Trillanes, a Navy veteran, had been among the junior officers involved in a failed mutiny during the Arroyo administration.
