The legal counsel of former president Rodrigo Duterte denied any reported claims of internal disagreements among his immediate family and his defense team.
“There are absolutely no internal disagreements among the persons responsible for handling the former President’s defense… There are also absolutely no personal misunderstandings between those who are of importance to the former President,” lawyer Nicholas Kaufman said in a written interview with the Facebook page Alvin & Tourism.
This as Kaufman described fugitive lawyer and Duterte’s former spokesman Harry Roque as an “irrelevancy,” expressing regret at spending time dealing with the latter’s “comical intrigues.”
Roque earlier claimed Duterte’s common-law wife, Honeylet Avanceña, had not been allowed to visit the former president in detention at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Netherlands.
Avanceña, in an interview with Boldyakan (also known as Boldyak TV) posted Friday, confirmed she was not allowed to visit Duterte recently.
According to Alvin & Tourism, she also supposedly implied that Kaufman has not personally engaged with or understood the former president in a “meaningful, contextual way.”
“I emailed (Kaufman) several times. I said, ‘Have mercy on the man.’ He’s 80 years old… Now you’re depriving me of visiting him,” Avanceña said in a mix of English and Filipino.
Asked for comment, Kaufman said: “Honeylet Avanceña, so it would appear, is emotionally distressed for reasons on which, as I mentioned previously, I cannot elaborate. As a consequence, she is making all sorts of wild allegations which are being stoked by others.”
“The simple fact of the matter is that the Vice President (Sara Duterte), as a lawyer herself, is fully qualified to judge the quality of my engagement with and work for the former President,” he added.
Duterte’s lead counsel also refused to expound on the official legal basis for the supposed suspension of Avanceña’s visitation rights.
“For judicial reasons and out of respect for family privacy, I am not going to comment on the veracity of Honeylet Avanceña’s allegations concerning her presence not being desired at the ICC detention center,” Kaufman said.
