Philstar.com
September 20, 2017 | 10:23am
MANILA, Philippines — President Rodrigo Duterte on Tuesday night said he just invented the bank account number of Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV allegedly containing "193,000" of some unspecified currency.
Trillanes went to Singapore Tuesday to disprove the claim of the president and his allies regarding the supposed bank accounts.
Duterte said he intentionally omitted some numbers from the alleged DBS Bank account to mislead Trillanes, who is one of his staunchest critics.
He said that Trillanes used the fictitious bank number in his bank waiver, making it unusable.
"Inimbento ko lang 'to," the president said in his interview with Erwin Tulfo on state-run PTV-4.
"Produkto ng isip ko to. Tinanggalan ko lang ginamit mo. Nag-issue ka ng waiver. Ang waiver mo iba ang account number iba ang totoo."
Duterte then showed a paper showing the alleged actual account number from a source shared by Assistant Secretary Mocha Uson and broadcaster Erwin Tulfo. The account number was 1178000281602.
It added that the account number read by Duterte was 178000296012.
President Rodrigo Duterte shows a document during his guesting in Erwin Tulfo's program "Sa Totoo Lang" which was taped in Malacañan Palace on Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2017. The paper shows that the alleged actual account number of Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV at the DBS Bank reposted by Assistant Secretary Mocha Uson and Tulfo was 1178000281602. Duterte argued that this is different from the account number he read, and admitted to inventing, which was 178000296012. Trillanes went to Singapore on Tuesday where the bank said the accounts were nonexistent. Richard Madelo/Presidential Photo
Duterte's supporters on social media argued that Trillanes' waiver was only for the bank account number 178000296012, which Duterte admitted he just invented.
Trillanes, however, said he asked the DBS teller if there are existing accounts under his name under the account numbers mentioned by Duterte and the one shared by Uson and Tulfo but both were nonexistent.
"I asked the DBS teller if there are existing accounts under my name, Antonio F. Trillanes IV or just Antonio F. Trillanes with account numbers 1178000281602 and 178000296012, whether existing or closed accounts or held singly or jointly with another person. She said that such accounts do not exist."
Trillanes also went to Raffles Tower to look for Hongkong Shanghai Bank, where he is said to have SGD 278,300 in a joint account with a certain Robert Fong. There was no such bank there.
He then headed to a mall on Raffles Boulevard but only found an ATM, not a bank branch there.
The senator signed bank secrecy waivers last week to allow scrutiny of bank accounts he has been accused of having after information on his 12 alleged bank accounts circulated on the internet through the page of Tulfo, the blog of Uson and the Davao Breaking News website.
He then challenged Duterte to do the same and sign waivers for the scrutiny of his alleged bank account at the Julia Vargas, Pasig City branch of the Bank of the Philippine Islands. The account allegedly contains P211 million.
Watch as Duterte admitted he just made up Trillanes' alleged bank account.
