DURING the second Quad Committee hearing, Lawyer Harry Roque stubbornly and disdainfully asserted that he had legitimately acquired the funds that Biancham Holdings and Trading Inc. had reported in its audited financial statements.
Roque claimed that he has lawfully acquired the P67-million from the sale of their family’s property in Paranaque City and then reinvested it into the Biancham’s subsidiary First Bataan Mariveles Holdings Corp.
Something doesn’t add up – his Statement of Assets, Liabilities, and Net Worth or SALN would indicate that he’s P60-million cash only but he’s saying that he invested P90-million in FBMHC.
So, where did the P30-million come from?
When asked to submit his SALN, income tax returns, deed of sale, among others, he openly declared that he’d submit all documents being requested by the committee just to show that he didn’t acquire his money from Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators.
However, despite efforts and follow-ups from the committee, Roque unsurprisingly failed to submit the documents that he volunteered and those being required of him.
This time he’s claiming that the documents weren’t relevant to the POGO investigations.
Clearly, he’s something to hide.
Indeed, the former spokesperson of ex-president Digong Duterte could give a thesaurus a run for its money by managing a hundred different ways to say ‘I’m not contradicting myself’ but never quite finding the one that means ’consistent.’
One thing appears to be consistent though. His actions are in harmony with how his former master, Digong, ran the country during his regime.
When he claimed that the records requested were private, it’s reminiscent of Duterte’s P2.5-billion confidential funds in 2022 and Vice President Sara Duterte’s P112-million confidential funds, which was claimed as a part of Department of Education’s budget.
Surely, the Filipino people are aware of Sara’s “shiminet” incident.
When she repeatedly asserted her shiminet phrase, she refused to identify how the confidential funds were used by the education department, she once ‘poorly’ headed, even going so far as to give a very general itemization of how the confidential funds were spent.
She even chose to forego defending the funds to be allocated to the Office of the Vice President.
The Filipino people would soon go after these kinds of public servants, let’s just wait and see.
