The dollar deposit loophole

The Senate impeachment court got most of it right on Monday. Presiding officer Chiz Escudero and the senator-judges granted subpoenas for the bank records, tax returns, and Anti-Money Laundering Council files of Vice President Sara Duterte and her husband, Mans Carpio, covering 20 companies and income tax records from 2007 to 2021. The documents, in the court’s words, were “reasonably described, readily identifiable, and prima facie relevant.” That is a court behaving like a court, and it deserves to be said plainly.

But look at what it could not touch. The request for the couple’s dollar accounts was denied outright, because Republic Act No. 6426, the Foreign Currency Deposit Act, declares those deposits absolutely confidential absent a written waiver. The court even invoked the Supreme Court’s 2012 restraining order in PSBank v. Senate Impeachment Court — the same order that locked away Renato Corona’s dollar deposits at the height of his trial. Fourteen years later, the wall stands in the same place, and Congress has not moved a single brick.

Remember how the Corona story actually ended. The impeachment court never saw his foreign currency deposits through legal process. It saw them because Corona, cornered, waived confidentiality on the stand. Conviction by theater, not by evidence. A 1974 decree written to attract foreign capital has become the panic room of the politically exposed, and every impeachment court since has had to negotiate around it. The fix is not complicated. Republic Act No. 1405, the peso secrecy law, already yields to impeachment. An amendment extending that exception to RA 6426, at least for impeachment proceedings and SALN verification, would take one page.

To be fair (and it should be conceded), the ruling also shows due process working for Duterte, whatever her spokesman says about fishing expeditions. The court excluded JTC Group and Pikimong Pikimong because their general information sheets do not link to the couple. It bound itself to the 2025 doctrine in Duterte v. House of Representatives, promising the subpoenaed records will not be mined for new offenses. The net was trimmed where the paper trail ran out. If the defense still elevates the matter to the Supreme Court, somebody should ask what grievance survives those carve-outs.

The deeper embarrassment belongs to the SALN regime. PHP 6.77 billion in large and suspicious transactions allegedly moved through the couple’s accounts between 2006 and 2025, and the disclosure system built precisely to surface such gaps surfaced nothing. Bank compliance officers did the work that lifestyle checks never did. Nor should anyone entertain the claim that Mans Carpio’s records are untouchable because marriage does not dissolve his separate legal personality. Twenty of the subpoenaed entities carry the couple’s fingerprints, from Davao food corporations to the family law office. Concealment through a spouse is the oldest trick in the unexplained wealth playbook, and anti-graft jurisprudence has treated it as such for decades. Accepting that defense would hand every future official a roadmap: park the money one wedding ring away.

The subpoenas are a start. The statute books are the unfinished business.