FORMER senator Antonio Trillanes IV and a civil society group, The Silent Majority, filed on Wednesday, January 21, 2026, complaints against Vice President Sara Duterte before the Office of the Ombudsman.
The complaints for plunder, malversation and graft complaints were filed over Duterte’s alleged misuse of billions worth of public funds since she was still the vice mayor and later the mayor of Davao City until she became the vice president and secretary of the Department of Education (DepEd).
“We are calling on the Ombudsman to give swift action to the cases filed against her so that she can be held accountable for her crimes against our nation,” Trillanes said.
The Office of the Vice President (OVP) is yet to comment on the matter.
Duterte has been in hot water over the alleged irregularities in spending the confidential and intelligence funds (CIF) of the Office of the Vice President and the DepEd.
Confidential and intelligence funds are special allocations meant to support sensitive government operations, typically for intelligence gathering, security, and peace-and-order functions. They are supposed to be secret for operational security, but they are still part of public funds and must be used legally and responsibly.
In 2022, the OVP was allocated with P125 million worth of confidential funds, which the agency spent in just 11 days.
Among the red flags in the CIF disbursements of the OVP are the dubious names of the recipients such as Mary Grace Piattos, Jay Kamote, and Miggy Mango, which all do not have any record on the Philippine Statistics Authority’s (PSA) database.
The PSA also reported that 405 of 677 names in the DepEd’s confidential fund receipts and 1,322 of 1,992 names from the OVP had no birth certificates.
In 2025, impeachment complaints were filed in the House of Representatives against Duterte partly over alleged misuse of confidential funds.
The complaints did not prosper after it was archived by the Senate. (TPM/SunStar Philippines)