DAVAO City First District Rep. Paolo “Pulong” Duterte, lawyer Mans Carpio (the husband of Vice President Sara Duterte), former Customs Commissioner Nicanor Faeldon will face drug smuggling raps following the complaint filed by former senator Antonio Trillanes IV, before the Department of Justice (DOJ).
Also named in the complaint are former Presidential Adviser on Indigenous Peoples’ Concerns Allen Capuyan, Davao City Councilor Small Abellera, Charlie Tan, and four others.
The case, according to Trillanes, stemmed from the alleged P6.4 billion shipment of crystal meth (locally known as shabu) that was seized in May 2017.
The contraband — 602.2 kilograms of crystal meth, worth P6.4 billion — were imported from China using the Bureau of Customs express lane.
The Senate blue ribbon committee conducted a series of public hearings, which revealed that the contraband was given a “green lane” passage to slip through Customs’s alert system and did not undergo physical inspection or document verification.
“This morning, I filed a case against Pulong Duterte and other members of the Davao group smuggling syndicate,” Trillanes said.
“This is the result of the Senate investigations conducted in 2017, in which we have identified Pulong, Charlie Tan, and Mans Carpio as the masterminds behind the P6.4 billion shabu shipment that was allowed to slip through Customs, in collaboration with its Commissioner Nic Faeldon and former presidential adviser Allen Capuyan, who was known as the ‘Big Brother, ” he pointed out.
“The conspiracy to import the subject shipment from China to the Philippines necessitated the crucial interventions of the ‘powerful insiders’ — the corrupt customs leadership, and more importantly, the very powerful protectors who used their influence to consummate this unlawful crime of importation of billions of pesos worth of dangerous drugs into the country,” he added.
