Photo by Wendell Alinea/Senate Social Media Unit
Manuel Mogato | September 8, 2026
MANILA — The country’s civil registry office told the Senate impeachment court that millions of pesos in confidential and intelligence funds from Vice President Sara Duterte went to “ghost” recipients, including children and the deceased.
Taking the witness stand on the 22nd day of Duterte’s impeachment trial, Marizza Grande, assistant national statistician at the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), said her office had checked the names of more than 2,699 people given to them by the House of Representatives as recipients of the vice president’s confidential and intelligence funds in 2022 and 2023 because the names appeared to be unusual and funny.
Some recipients have names such as Pagong (turtle), Pusa (cat), Matsing (monkey), or snack foods like Piattos and Oishi, private prosecutor Mae Divinagracia told the court. (Also read: Prosecution unveils more auditing rules violations in Vice President’s use of confidential funds)
When verified from the PSA database, matching the names with live birth, marriage, and death records in the agency’s file, about 63 percent did not match.
Grande said the PSA also found that 20 were the names of children who were born just months before the Office of the Vice President and the Department of Education started handing out rewards for confidential information gathered.
Another 37 names were deceased, including a two-month-old infant who died in 1965, based on the death records at the PSA.
More than 1,287 names from the Office of the Vice President and 398 names from the Department of Education could be fictitious and did not match the PSA records for live births, marriages, and deaths.
Divinagracia said Duterte’s offices submitted more than 4,000 acknowledgement receipts, with the names of the recipients, in 2024 to liquidate the 612 million pesos in confidential and intelligence funds.
But she said only 2,699 were sent to the PSA for checks because their names appeared in the acknowledgement receipts. The rest were only unrecognizabke signatures.
The PSA’s database has more than 97 percent of all 120 million Filipinos based on the 2024 census. Those not in the database are Muslims in the south and indigenous people in the mountains, and a few who failed to register a birth, marriage, or death.
Divinagracia said the inclusion of minors and the deceased, and more than 1,500 names that did not match the PSA database, only bolstered the prosecution’s theory that the money was spent on something else.
Duterte’s defense lawyers said the PSA did not find the names of the recipients of the confidential funds because they used “aliases” and “codenames” in the intelligence work.
The PSA database does not keep aliases and government codenames, the defense lawyer argued.
If convicted, Duterte will be removed from office and will be barred from seeking any public office.
