Based on speculation alone, www.politics.com.ph published an article quoting Former Arroyo Cabinet Secretary Rigoberto Tiglao's claim that Duterte paid Php 20 million to Atty. Salvador Panelo to handle Trillanes' accusation that Duterte had Php 211 million in the BPI.
The article is obviously intended to malign Mayor Duterte by suggesting that he is very rich as opposed to the image he would like to project. In fairness to Mayor Duterte; never said he was poor, what he admitted to is that he didn't have the money to run a presidential campaign.
What the article conveniently leaves out is that Atty. Panelo is a long time friend and trusted by Duterte.
Some quarters will say that if Tiglao is lying, then Duterte must sue him for libel. Unfortunately suing for libel is a long process and diverts much needed attention to something very petty. Imagine, if 1,000 libelous attacks against Duterte are thrown at him per year; Duterte will have to spend money for lawyers and waste his time dealing with trash. Duterte must choose his battles.
The full www.politics.com.ph article is shown below for you to study.
Duterte paid P20M to Ampatuan lawyer to block Trillanes from opening BPI account until after election day – report
www.politics.com.ph
Former Arroyo Cabinet Secretary Rigoberto Tiglao is not buying leading presidential bet Rodrigo Duterte’s yarn that he is poor and that he only has thousands at the Bank of the Philippine Islands account at J. Vargas branch and not hundreds of millions as claimed by Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV.
Tiglao said that Duterte’s decision to hire high-priced lawyer Atty. Salvador Panelo showed that he was loaded and that his BPI account held more money than what he wanted the public to believe. “Panelo has built up a reputation in the country’s legal circles as the most expensive criminal lawyer ‘of the last resort’,” said Tiglao in his Manila Times column.
Among Panelo’s clients is the Ampatuan clan which has been able to delay the trial of the 2009 Maguindanao massacre despite massive evidence in the killing of 59 individuals.
“His (Panelo’s) acceptance fee is said to be P10 million, a veteran lawyer said, and the talk is that he asked Duterte for P20 million to handle this P211 million allegation, reportedly telling the candidate’s staff that his fee is a drop in the bucket of his overflowing campaign kitty,” said Tiglao
Tiglao said Panelo crafted Duterte’s waiver to appease the public seeking clarity on his alleged ill-gotten wealth while delaying the opening of the account, which Trillanes claimed had P2.4 billion in total transactions from 2006 to 2015, until after the May 9 election.
”It (waiver) is so legally convoluted that BPI lawyers said they had never seen such a ‘waiver’ before that they now have to study it closely with their external law counsels to be sure the bank won’t be sued. Panelo’s alleged P20 million fee for handling this controversy obviously is well-earned,” said Tiglao.
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