The prosecution just got permission to treat the Vice President’s own right-hand man as an adverse witness. On Day 18 of the impeachment trial, the Senate court declared OVP Assistant Secretary and Assistant Chief of Staff Lemuel Ortonio hostile, handing prosecutors the power to cross-examine their own witness.
What happened on the floor
Private prosecutor Atty. Mae Divinagracia offered Ortonio’s testimony and formally asked that he be qualified as a hostile witness, making him the second prosecution witness to receive the designation after former OVP special disbursing officer Gina Acosta. Presiding Officer Sen. Chiz Escudero granted it, which changes the rules of engagement: prosecutors may now ask leading questions during direct examination, the tactic normally reserved for witnesses fighting the party that called them.
Defense counsel Atty. Kristine Ferrer objected to how prosecutors framed what the testimony would show, arguing the prosecution was asserting conclusions of fact and law not yet established before the court. The trial is currently hearing Article I, which alleges misuse of 612.5 million pesos in confidential funds allocated to the OVP and the Department of Education.
Why the prosecution wanted him hostile
The prosecution says Ortonio’s testimony will help establish that the OVP’s confidential funds were not intended for, or used on, a legitimate confidential public purpose. As assistant chief of staff, Ortonio sat inside the office whose fund requests and utilization documents are at the center of Article I.
His early answers already gave the court substance. Ortonio admitted he refused several invitations to appear before a 2024 House probe into the OVP’s confidential funds, and testified that the OVP he joined in 2022 had no confidential funds left from the previous administration, prompting the 2022 request for a fresh allocation. Both details feed directly into the prosecution’s paper trail on how the 125-million-peso and 500-million-peso requests moved.
| Day 18 at a glance | Detail |
|---|---|
| Witness | Lemuel G. Ortonio, OVP Assistant Secretary and Assistant Chief of Staff |
| Designation | Hostile witness, second after Gina Acosta |
| Presiding officer | Senate President Chiz Escudero |
| Article being heard | Article I: 612.5M pesos in alleged misused confidential funds |
| What it unlocks | Leading questions by the prosecution |
Where the trial stands
The hostile-witness designation is a procedural win, not a verdict: it signals the prosecution believes its own witness knows things he would not volunteer without pressure. Conviction still needs the two-thirds threshold the court has been parsing all month, the 16-vote line we broke down when Ridon’s vote math made the rounds. The trial itself has been running since July, when Day 4 opened the presentation of evidence.
Ortonio’s cross-examination continues. Every answer from here lands in a trial where the numbers, the bags, and the signatures are all in evidence, and the man who ran the office’s day-to-day is now talking under leading questions.
