Now you see the money. Now you don’t.
And if Senator-Judge Vicente “Tito” Sotto III has the metaphor right, the money does not exactly disappear. It dances.
Sotto’s “tinikling scheme,” raised during the Oct. 7 impeachment hearing, may be the most memorable description yet of a rather unmemorable banking maneuver. Get a manager’s check, leave it unused, let Dec. 31 pass, then return the funds to the account. Like dancers slipping between bamboo poles, the money is there, then not there, then there again.
BPI Central Metro Manila division head Marwin Galvez said he was unfamiliar with “tinikling” as banking jargon. Understandable. Banks have compliance manuals, not choreography notes.
The transactions themselves, however, are harder to dismiss as a matter of terminology.
Galvez testified that a P40.65-million time deposit under the names Rodrigo Duterte or Rodrigo Roa Duterte and Sara Z. Duterte was opened in January 2010. After 12 rollovers, it had grown to P41.72 million before the funds were used to purchase manager’s checks.
The prosecution also flagged a separate P55.13-million time deposit that it said followed a similar route. Together, the two sums amount to roughly P96 million that prosecutors said were repeatedly converted into manager’s checks and kept in a “floating” state, keeping them out of the Dutertes’ year-end bank balances.
That is where the accounting gets interesting.
The money did not necessarily cease to exist. It simply ceased to sit where a year-end balance could readily see it.
Prosecutors said portions of the funds were eventually used to buy four insurance policies worth a combined P80 million for former President Rodrigo Duterte from BPI-Philam Life Assurance Corp., as well as a P16.85-million manager’s check payable to Samuel “Sammy” Uy.
Bank records showed combined year-end balances of P59 million in 2022, P71.3 million in 2023, and P22.2 million in 2024. Sara Duterte’s SALNs for those years declared zero cash in bank.
The defense says cash could have been reported under “other personal properties.”
That is for the impeachment court to weigh.
But the financial question remains stubbornly simple. If you own the money, and it remains yours, does changing its form change the wealth?
A manager’s check can change where money sits. It cannot, by itself, make wealth disappear.
The choreography may have an explanation. It may even have a legitimate one.
But when roughly P96 million repeatedly vanishes from year-end balances and later resurfaces through checks, the public is entitled to ask whether the accounting is describing reality or merely rearranging the furniture.
Tinikling is an elegant dance.
Financial disclosure should be less so.
