A self-styled witness who claims insider knowledge of smuggling activities in the port of Manila has come out in the open and implicated former president Rodrigo Duterte’s family members and former appointees in a 2018 attempt to ship a large volume of illegal drugs to the country.
This prompted Vice-president Sara Duterte-Carpio to immediately cry “political harassment,” stressing that the political attacks against her family is a “distraction” from the “real problems” that the Philippines is facing.
The Vice-president made the statement a day after Jimmy Guban, a former intelligence officer of the Bureau of Customs (BOC), testified at the August 16 joint committee hearings of the House of Representatives that he was asked in March 2018 to facilitate the trouble-free release from BOC a cargo containing shabu worth PHP 6.8 billion. The smuggling attempt was foiled.
Presently detained at the National Penitentiary for his supposed role in the drug shipment try, the bulletproof-clad Guban told lawmakers that the cargo was owned by Davao City Rep. Paolo Duterte, the son of former president Duterte; lawyer Manases Carpio, husband of the Vice-president; and Chinese businessman Michael Yang, presidential economic adviser during Duterte’s administration.
Guban admitted that Rep. Duterte, Carpio and Yang were not known to him personally and he did not meet them in the past. He said he got their names from Davao City Councilor Nilo Abellera, Jr., known to him as a close friend of Rep. Duterte.
After Guban gave his testimony, Rep. Duterte issued a statement denying any involvement in the alleged drug shipment during his father’s administration. “I don’t know Jimmy Guban and I am sure he doesn’t know me. We never had a transaction,” the eldest son of the former president said on the day of the House hearings.
The former president’s son-in-law issued a similar denial on August 19. “It is evident that the allegations and insinuations made by Mr. Guban… are entirely baseless and maliciously false,” Carpio said. Like his Vice-president wife, he branded the claims as “politically motivated.”
Yang has yet to make a public response to Guban’s allegations at this writing.
In the House hearing, the disgraced ex-Customs official claimed that Councilor Abellera requested him to expedite the release of the cargo sans the usual screening and inspection as a favor to then president Duterte’s men. Guban said he was made to believe that the cargo merely contained garments and agricultural products.
Before the cargo could be spirited out of Customs jurisdiction, however, Guban said it was intercepted by anti-narcotics operatives who were then acting on an intelligence tip. The cargo container was opened and yielded 4 magnetic lifters stuffed with shabu with a combined weight of 700 kilograms.
Guban was charged and then eventually convicted for attempted illegal drug smuggling.
Guban was also brought to the Senate in 2018 to face a formal inquiry in which he implicated Police Col. Eduardo Acierto. Acierto went into hiding since then.
According to the latest testimony of Guban, he was coerced in 2018 to implicate Col. Acierto to the drug smuggling. But the police colonel, he said, was actually the one responsible for apprehending the cargo.
Guban further claimed in the August 16 hearing that a media man named Paul Gutierrez visited him in his Senate detention cell in 2018 to warn him against dropping the names of Rep. Duterte, Carpio and Yang in the legislative inquiry. Gutierrez is now the media task force chief of President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. with the rank of undersecretary.
Guban said that Gutierrez, in warning him against naming Duterte’s men in the probe, was acting as emissary of former National Press Club president Benny Antiporda who was later appointed as Duterte’s undersecretary for Environment. Antiporda was supposed to be doing business with Duterte’s men, according to Guban.
Undersec. Gutierrez and former undersecretary Antiporda both denied Guban’s assertions.
