On the 27th day of Vice President Sara Duterte's Senate impeachment trial, a Securities and Exchange Commission official testified on Sept. 21 that Duterte remained listed as a member of the Board of Directors of Metro City Chow Foods Corp. in the company's General Information Sheet for 2025 — years into a term during which the 1987 Constitution bars the vice president from holding outside business interests. The testimony is the latest piece of documentary evidence House prosecutors have introduced to support the Article II charge that Duterte amassed unexplained wealth, this time built not on bank records or SALN entries but on the corporate registry itself.
SEC Company Registration Director Gerardo Fernando del Rosario, testifying under subpoena, read directly from the commission's own filings: "Member pa rin siya ng Board of Directors sa GIS ng 2025." Under further questioning, Del Rosario affirmed that the Constitution's restriction on the vice president engaging in business or holding financial interests in private companies exists specifically to prevent the kind of conflict of interest that a sitting board seat creates — the same principle prosecutors have invoked throughout the trial's Article II presentation on Duterte's assets and business ties.
The defense did not dispute that Duterte's name appears in the 2025 filing. Instead, defense counsel Justin Nicol Gular objected to how prosecutors packaged the SEC summary, arguing it improperly conflated the company's corporate transactions with Duterte's personal shareholdings and accusing the prosecution of "mind conditioning" the court. Presiding Officer and Senate President Francis Escudero allowed the documents into evidence after prosecutors clarified the distinction between the vice president's personal holdings and the company's overall totals — leaving the underlying board-membership finding on the record, unrebutted on its substance.
Not everything prosecutors sought made it in. The defense successfully blocked the identification of documents tied to two other companies, JTC Group and Pikimong Pikimong Philippines Corp., citing earlier court rulings that excluded those firms from the scope of the subpoena — meaning whatever those records might show about Duterte's business network stays outside the trial record entirely. Separately, prosecutors withdrew a planned Civil Service Commission witness who was to testify on SALN-filing procedures, without a stated reason on the record as reported.
What remains unanswered: exactly when Duterte joined Metro City Chow Foods' board, what the company does, whether it holds any government contracts, and how she or her office account for the board seat itself. As of this writing, no statement from Duterte or her legal team directly addressing the board-membership finding — as opposed to objecting to how prosecutors presented it — had been reported.
Context
The SEC testimony builds on ground the prosecution laid earlier in the trial. On Sept. 15, retired Sandiganbayan Justice Amparo Cabotaje-Tang testified that repeated omissions in a public official's Statement of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth, combined with disproportionate wealth, trigger a legal presumption of graft that the official must personally rebut — a presumption Duterte's defense has yet to answer with anything beyond procedural objections to the prosecution's evidence. The trial itself remains shadowed by an unresolved dispute over how many senator-judges must vote to convict, with retired Justice Adolfo Azcuna telling the court on Sept. 18 that the two-thirds threshold is fixed at 16 votes out of all 24 senators, full stop — a fight scheduled for oral arguments on Sept. 23, two days after this testimony.
Sources
- ICYMI LIVE UPDATES: Sara Duterte Impeachment Trial (September 21, 2026) — GMA News Online