by Diego Morra
On Sept. 28, 2026, Acting Davao City Mayor Sebastian “Baste” Duterte will have to appear before the Senate impeachment court to answer questions about the deals of GenCorp Industries, Inc., which is managed by Duterte ally Jaime T. Cruz, a businessman who husbanded GenCorp into amassing billions of pesos in revenues, with the Davao City Hall that he supposedly administers. Cruz is linked to Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio and her husband, Atty. Manases Carpio and Sara has listed herself as a stockholder of GenCorp despite being Vice President.
To show how deliberately she has flouted the law, Sara maintains her shareholdings in 18 corporations and acts as a director in some of them, based on her admissions in her Statements of Assets and Liabilities and Net Worth (SALNs) filed before the Office of the Ombudsman and the General Information Sheets (GIS) filed before the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC.) So you have official documents corroborating the allegations of the public and private prosecutors and the squads of Sara’s lawyers could only cite irrelevant legal passages that do not impugn the mandatory character of the constitutional provision on divestment and the commonsensical ethical behavior required of elected officials .
Having shares of stock, being a director and earning dividends are purportedly passive forms of behavior in contrast to direct participation in business operations, which only Jaime T. Cruz exercises. In short, he is the guardian of the treasury, the operator who performs the role of a shield for his betters or his principals. They may be called dummies, frontmen, assigns or agents. That GenCorp eventually controlled fastfood outlets and provided the needs of City Hall and its constituents is a prime example of Duterte self-dealing. Baste’s tortured explanation about not knowing that Ate Sara was neck-deep into the operations of GenCorp and was never informed that Sara had financial interest in Jollibee and Chowking operations are declarations that cannot be swallowed hook, line and sinker even by the people of Davao City.
On Sept. 22, 2026, the Senate subpoenaed Baste Duterte to appear before the impeachment court between Sept. 28 and 30 and answer questions about his deals with GenCorp, which Baste described as “aboveboard” and the abided by the provisions of the Procurement Law. He even corrected reports that GenCorp only had deals with his city administration worth P18-million, saying the correct figure was P33.2-million covering 19 contracts. Baste was also ordered to bring documents related to all the deals with GenCorp since 2020. As confirmed by the SEC, the listed GenCorp officers are Kimberly Justine Y. Cruz as president, Richie Yvette L. Cruz as treasurer and Girley S. De La Cruz as corporate secretary. It seems that all three officers are related to secure seamless operations.
Acting as if he were dumbfounded when Sara’s name was linked to GenCorp, provoking criticisms from observers that Baste failed to exercise due diligence in protecting the people’s interest and did not exhibit extraordinary care in ascertaining that no Duterte name was hidden by GenCorp’s corporate veil. It reeks of facile and juvenile defense for the courageous Baste to say that Sara’s name or even the Duterte surname appeared in any of the company’s official documents submitted to the Davao City government. There are always corporate layers that could be employed by corrupt government officials and their dummies. It is a pathetic excuse for Baste to feign innocence on profitable deals that could not have come to fruition without Duterte influence.
“I, and all other officials and employees of the City Government of Davao, never had any knowledge of Vice President Sara Z. Duterte holding an interest in Gencorp Industries Inc.,” he said. “Furthermore, neither the name Sara Zimmerman Duterte nor the surname ‘Duterte’ appears in any of the official documents such as, among others, the Articles of Incorporation, submitted by Gencorp Industries Inc. across the 19 contracts and transactions in question,” he added. Fat chance the senators would believe Baste’s theory that Duterte’s special interest in GenCorp did not matter at all. This is like the story of the profitable P1-million daily budget for waste disposal in Davao City that ran for eight long years, with the project proponent purportedly pocketing P800,000 daily in tandem with a corrupt city official for a cool P288 million annually or P2.304 billion in eight years. It was a matter that the murdered Jun Pala discussed in his radio program before an assassin killed him in 2003, the late broadcast journalist Waldy Carbonell revealed.
Baste is actually doing a reprise of defense counsel Michael Wesley Poa’s performance on the dock, when, as Sara’s chief of staff at the Department of Education (DepEd), he declared he was out of the loop on the spending of hundreds of millions of pesos in confidential funds (CFs) and was unaware of the projects and programs sustained by the CF even as he was the main player in asking that the Commission on Audit (COA) merely issue a query rather than disallow all the cash paid to ghost informants, the bogus expenses for the youth leadership summits and 53 other activities bankrolled by the Philippine Army (PA) and local government units (LGUs.) Joined by Lemuel Ortonio and Gina Acosta as lyric soprano, they may well do an encore as Sara’s Gang of Four.
But wait, COA isn’t finished with Sara just yet as it found dubious documentation for her P168-million disaster mitigation budget as well as other financial assistance for poor women and the victims of disasters, both natural or man-made. The same holds true for the total of P2.697-billion in CFs for Davao City when Rodrigo Duterte called the shots and Sara and her brothers were treated royally, well beyond the pale, where lawlessness is the coin of the realm.#
