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Former president Rodrigo Duterte’s lead counsel Nicholas Kaufman clarified that there are “no internal disagreements” within the defense team amid allegations made by Duterte’s common-law wife, Honeylet Avanceña.
Former president Rodrigo Duterte and his lead counsel Nicholas Kaufman (Screengrab from ICC, ABS-CBN News videos)
In an interview with pro-Duterte blogger Alvin & Tourism on Friday, Aug. 1, he shrugged off Avanceña’s supposed claims that Kaufman was not personally engaging with Duterte.
“There are absolutely no internal disagreements among the persons responsible for handling the former President’s defence,” the lawyer said, stressing that Vice President Sara Duterte “is fully qualified to judge the quality of my engagement with and work for the former President.”
He also refused to elaborate on reports that Avanceña, the former president’s common-law wife, was unable to visit him at the Scheveningen Prison in The Hague, Netherlands.
“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 centre,” he said in a transcript of an interview posted on Facebook.
He claimed that Avanceña appears to be “emotionally distressed” and “is making all sorts of wild allegations which are being stoked by others.”
Kaufman pointed out that former presidential spokesman Harry Roque, with whom he had engaged in a tensed word war in the past week, was an “irrelevancy.”
“My only regret is that I am being forced to spend far too much time having to deal with his comical intrigues. There are also absolutely no personal misunderstandings between those who are of importance to the former President,” he stressed.
Various social media reports quoted Roque saying that Avanceña has been barred from visiting the former president at the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) facility, where he has been detained since his arrest and extradition in March.
The former Palace official claimed that Avanceña’s visit last week was all cancelled without explanation.
