Bicol Saro Party-list Rep. Terry Ridon doesn't want to wait for the start of Vice President Sara Duterte's Senate impeachment trial to shoot down her lawyer's arguments, particularly on the alleged discrepancies in the respondent's statements of assets, liabilities and net worth (SALNs).

For Ridon, team Duterte’s explanation that she lumped her cash on hand and bank deposits under the line item “other assets” or “various properties” in her SALN for the last six years still does not justify the billions of pesos in transactions traced to her accounts since 2005.

“Assuming that cash and bank deposits were included in ‘other assets,’ ‘di pa rin siya lusot (she's still not off the hook). Declared amount of other assets is only around ₱8.75 to ₱21 million from 2019 to 2024. Saan napunta ‘yung bilyones? (Where did those billions go?)” Ridon said in a statement Sunday, April 26.

The lawyer-legislator was referring to key revelations made by the Office of the Ombudsman and the Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) regarding the finances of Vice President Duterte and her husband, lawyer Manases Carpio during an April 22 hearing of the Committee on Justice.

According to Ridon, the numbers the AMLC revealed to the solons tell a different story to what was declared in official SALN filings throughout the years.

Compared to the combined ₱8.75 million to ₱21 million that the Vice President and Carpio declared under “others” and “various properties” from 2019 to 2024, Ridon said AMLC records showed nearly ₱2 billion in transactions in 2024 alone, and pointed to a scale of financial activity far beyond what had been declared.

Ridon said the figures also reveal a pattern of massive cash flows since 2005, with hundreds of millions moving through their accounts in earlier years and a sharp uptick in Carpio’s transactions beginning in 2019. He says this indicates that this is not an isolated discrepancy, but a sustained level of financial activity over time.

Yet Vice President Duterte’s SALNs show unchanged personal assets figure under “others” from 2019 to 2022—a flat ₱5.25 million split across two line items of ₱3 million and ₱2.25 million, with not a single variation across all four years, Ridon pointed out.

Meanwhile, Carpio also declared the exact same personal assets figure under “others", or ₱8.075 million every year from 2021 to 2023.

If the Vice President insists that their cash on hand and bank deposits were captured under “others", Ridon said, it defies logic that the figure would remain identical year after year.

“Kahit sabihin pa natin na idineklara nga ang ibang liquid assets sa ‘others', it still doesn’t make sense na hindi magbabago ang pera na hawak mo (Even if we say that some liquid assets were declared under ‘others', it still doesn’t make sense that the amount of cash on hand would remain unchanged),” he said.

“Ano ’yun? Eksakto ang ginastos at inilabas na pera sa naipasok sa bangko para ni sentimo hindi magbabago ang hawak niya by the end of the year? (What is that? The exact amount spent and withdrawn matched exactly what was deposited in the bank, so that not even a centavo changed by the end of the year?) he asked in a rhetorical question.

Ridon noted that the only years in which the personal assets declared under “others” or “various” changed—during the period when neither Duterte nor Carpio listed a specific line item for cash or bank deposits—were 2023 and 2024 for Duterte and 2019, 2020, and 2024 for Carpio.

He said Duterte declared around ₱6.65 million under “others” in 2023 and ₱5.82 million in 2024. On the other hand, Carpio declared ₱3.5 million in 2019 and 2020 under “others", and in 2024, ₱6.63 million under “others” and ₱8.67 million under “various".

While there were slight changes in these years, Ridon said these figures still pale in comparison to the ₱6.77 billion worth of covered and suspicious transactions the AMLC flagged in her accounts from 2006 to 2025.

This argument, however, assumes that the figures declared under “others” or “various” consist entirely of cash on hand and bank deposits, Ridon said.

If those amounts were in fact shared with other personal properties, Ridon said, the actual cash component would be even smaller—making the gap with the AMLC’s flagged transactions even more glaring.

“At kung iisipin natin na may iba pang personal properties na isinama doon sa ‘others’ or ‘various,’ ibig sabihin mas liliit pa ang cash component (And if we consider that other personal properties were included under ‘others’ or ‘various,’ that would mean the cash component becomes even smaller),” he stressed.

“Tapos ikukumpara mo pa sa bilyun-bilyong transaksyon na na-flag ng AMLC sa mga account ng pangalawang pangulo at ng kanyang asawa, mas malala pa ang discrepancy (Then when you compare it to the billions in transactions flagged by the AMLC in the accounts of the vice president and her husband, the discrepancy becomes even worse)," he added.

Ridon also noted that the actual transactions could exceed even the ₱6.77 billion the AMLC reported—since covered transactions are defined as those exceeding ₱500,000 in a single day, and amounts smaller than that are not included unless flagged as suspicious.

Duterte declared a net worth of ₱88.51 million in her 2024 SALN, or nearly twelve times the ₱7.25 million she reported when she first entered public office as Davao City vice mayor in 2007.