by Diego Morra
The Nov. 9 and 10 impeachment trial sessions of Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio turned out to be poorly choreographed, with the defense witnesses apparently unprepared to handle questions from the prosecution, with two of them suffering from instant amnesia and can’t recall joining an all-expenses paid excursion to China the previous year. One, Davao City assessor Jaime Adalin, even tried to be funny by tagging a question “irrelevant,” and drew guffaws from the gallery.
However, he could determine a property of Sara’s husband, Manasas Carpio, is listed in Sara’s SALNs even without seeing the coordinates, or the metes and bounds, of the asset. His testimony runs afoul of the testimony of two property registrars who said Carpio’s landholdings were not reflected in Duterte’s SALN. Davao City Register of Deeds IV Kathy Florence Baldonado testified that Carpio had acquired a 379-sq-m lot in Juna Subdivision, Matina Crossing, Talomo, Davao City, which was not declared in her SALN.
Samal Deputy Register of Deeds III Marco Pineda testified that Carpio bought a 751-sq-m lot in Matanos for P3,453,849 on March 15, 2018. Pineda said no entry in Duterte’s SALN matched the deed of absolute sale for that property. However, when shown images of a building from Google Maps with the sign “Prime Bistro, Adalin admitted he wasn’t sure. He can’t remember the China journey and couldn’t be certain that it was the property which he said was included in Sara’s SALNs. On Nov. 10, the defense presented its second witness, Samal City Assessor Engr. John Kenneth Enumerables, who will testify on property records linked to Atty. Manases Carpio.
Presiding officer Sen. Chiz Escudero said senators might be confused with the location of the Carpio property in the deed of sale since it says the property is located in Barangay San Isidro but the TCT shows the lot is in Barangay Matanos. Enumerables says it is a small matter, a mere technical description. Sen. Panfilo Lacson said Matanos is actually located in Barangay Pangubatan, which Enumerables confirmed. Prosecutor Prosecutor Benjamon Tolosa Jr. noted that the deed of Absolute Sale for the property was executed on March 2018, while Duterte’s 2025 SALN showed the property was acquired in 2013. Enumerables acknowledged the discrepancy and said he is not certain if the property in the TCT is the same property in the SALN.
If Adalin performed badly for the defense, Davao City accountant Vingelin Bajan snatched the bragging rights for the day’s worst dodger. Bajan claimed she wasn’t friends with Sara Zimmerman Suterte Carpio when she was appointed city accountant in 2026. 1:50 p.m. Apparently, prosecutor Mae Divinagracia argued, Sara trusted Bajan so much that she appointed her chairperson of the City Audit and Transition Teams for Barangays in 2018, and as member of the Investigating Committee of Davao City in 2020.
Divinagracia asked Bajan if the accounting firm she worked for was registered in 2023 with the Securities and Exchange Commission in (SEC.) Bajan could not answer at first, but later said “yes” after getting some signal from the defense, prompting the prosecutor to ask the court to stop her from getting coached. Bajan also hesitated when asked by Divinagracia to confirm if the signature appearing in the original Articles of Partnership of the accounting firm she worked with was hers, and she dithered and said she cannot remember the 2003 documents of Ampil, Elises, Ciudadano & Co., causing uproar among the senators who told her pointblank that it was unacceptable that she could not answer such a simple question. Still, Bajan said the signature was similar as hers but insisted she cannot recall signing the document that contains her tax account number. Sensing that she is not being truthful, Escudero, Sens. Bam Aquino and Francis Pangilinan warned her that she is in “danger zone,” which could lead to a contempt citation or even a case of perjury.
Divinagracia noted that the firm Elises and Ciudadano is the same Elises and Ciudadano which is the external auditor of GenCorp Industries Inc., Metro City Chow Foods, and Great Jolly Times, all of which are businesses in which Sara and her hubby own shares of stock. Pangilinan points out that the address of Bajan’s former accounting firm — Ampil, Elises, Ciudadano & Co. — in Davao City is the same address of the auditing firm of GenCorp and Metro City Chow. Bajan also denied knowing anything about GenCorp, Pikimong Pikimong and other companies related to Duterte and Carpio. Bajan also could not answer categorically Sen. Risa Hontiveros who asked her if she ever certified or signed a disbursement voucher for a company related to the Dutertes. All she said was that there were no names in the supporting documents, consistent with the “I don’t know” excuse crafted by the defense. Yet, she admitted touring Shanghai and Beijing like Adalin.
Bajan’s evasive tactics only created more problems for her and Sara as they inevitably showed she was trying to protect Sara. Moreover, it just might be true that her former accounting fire may be doing work for Cale88 Foods, the company that Carpio controlled and profited immensely from “selling” a product made by two people to China, Hong Kong and other destinations notorious for money laundering. Before the Sara impeachment trial, Carpio mysteriously disappeared from the ownership structure of Cale88 Foods, his 47.5% equity gone in a jiffy. Corporate records also showed that the firm was not buying bananas. One likely theory is that Cale88 Foods was a shell company for foreign interests engaged in disinformation campaigns, like China’s using operatives in Mindanao to attack the Philippine position on the 2016 award of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) that knocked out China’s “historical rights” to maritime features in the South China Sea.#
