Why are Marcos and Romualdez not being investigated for the ghost flood control scam?

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BY all logic, they should be. If this happened in Japan, the two would have committed hara-kiri, either out of guilt or incompetence. If in Korea, they would have called for a press conference and bowed as deeply right after they announced their resignation. If in the US, probably just a threat of impeachment and their resignation.

To paraphrase a popular joke that circulated after Ninoy Aquino was killed: “Everyone knows Marcos and Romualdez are the masterminds of the ghost flood control scam — except 113 million Filipinos.”

The so-called “ghost flood control projects” constitute one of the biggest budgetary scandals in years — rivaling the pork barrel scams during the Aquino III administration forever. Yet despite mounting evidence, despite the Commission on Audit (COA) reports, despite first-hand testimonies from whistleblowers and local officials, no formal investigation has even touched President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. or his first cousin, resigned House Speaker Martin Romualdez.

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The BSP anomaly

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A PUFF piece on the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas by Stephen CuUnjieng, a colleague here in The Manila Times, and a director of Marcos’ pipe-dream Maharlika Investment Fund, prodded me to write a column that I had been holding on to since last year for personal reasons.

CuUnjieng, a banker for most of his working life, praised to high heavens the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas “as the best example of what effective and clean government can be in the Philippines.” CuUnjieng makes the BSP out as if it is a place where angels work, while the rest of the country’s bureaucrats and all its officials, from president to Cabinet members to legislators, are demons. This avowed empiricist, however, did not mention crucial empirical information about the BSP, which, like a bolt of lightning, could explain why the BSP cannot be a model for clean government and, to a certain extent, explain why it is “clean.” According to Commission on Audit reports, BSP officials are by far the highest-paid public servants in the country, their salaries five to even 10 times that of other officials in the country — which, of course, cannot be replicated anywhere else in the bureaucracy. Only in the Philippines is the BSP governor’s annual P48 million salary bigger than the President of the Republic’s P5.2 million.

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Israel’s atrocities cannot be washed clean by diplomatic platitudes

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THE article by Israeli Ambassador Dana Kursh, “From joy to grief: Reflections on October 7 and the enduring bonds between Israel and the Philippines,” published here is an expertly polished piece of moral cosmetics, which, however, still has death’s reek.

It shamelessly packages two years of blood and rubble into a language of “resilience,” “faith” and “friendship.” It asks Filipinos to weep with Israel yet avert their eyes from Gaza’s smoking ruins. It calls on our empathy to cleanse Israel’s conscience.

It is certainly a demonstration of the height of hypocrisy that this envoy of a genocidal state does not even mention in her 1,000-word article a particular number so important in any discussion of Israel today: 61,755. That is the number of Palestinians, half of them women and children, killed by the Israel Defense Force (IDF) — of which this envoy was once an army captain — since the Hamas raid in Oct. 7, 2023, in its war of extermination of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

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The Blue Ribbon’s credibility evaporated with Lacson as chairman

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BY any standard of law and morality, Sen. Panfilo “Ping” Lacson should never have accepted the post of chairman of the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee in the first place.

His Sept. 7 Facebook post, in which he declared, “Mr. President, we have your back,” was a confession of servility to President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

Lacson’s post was nauseating as it was made by a senator who the very next day would be named chairman of the Blue Ribbon Committee that is in the middle of investigating the biggest case of corruption in our modern history — which cannot exclude Marcos as a suspect. The committee — headed by opposition senator Rodante Marcoleta — had held just two hearings and Marcos removes him and replaces him with Lacson. Lacson even became a propagandist — a poor one — for the president, his post showing Marcos’ picture supposedly crying in anger over the discovered ghost flood control projects. Lacson melodramatically wrote:

“We feel you, Mr. President. You have given me and my team the firm resolve to do our part in exposing, even compiling solid evidence to nail these ‘greedy flood control profiteers’ and their cohorts both in the public and private sectors. We have your back sir. (Emphasis in the original.)”

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Freeze orders for everyone – except, of course, Romualdez

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THE Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC), with the Court of Appeals’ swift approval, has unleashed a barrage of freeze orders against those tied to the ghost flood-control projects. Senators Joel Villanueva and Jinggoy Estrada, Rep. Zaldy Co, dozens of Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) officials, and private contractors connected to the notorious Discaya couple have all had their bank accounts and assets immobilized.

By Oct. 3, a staggering 1,620 bank accounts, 54 insurance policies, 163 motor vehicles, 40 real properties, and 12 e-wallet accounts were under lock. Earlier orders had already covered 836 bank accounts, 12 e-wallets, 24 insurance policies and 81 vehicles. All told, nearly 2,400 bank accounts have been frozen.

Yet in this massive legal dragnet, one name is glaringly absent: President Marcos Jr.’s cousin and former House speaker Martin Romualdez. Ousted from his powerful post on Sept. 17, his guilt in the ghost flood-control scam — and the hijacking of national budgets from 2023 to 2025 — seems undeniable, waiting only for confirmation through investigations and money-trail evidence.

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Romualdez: A politically dead man walking

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THE most damning revelations about Speaker Martin Romualdez’s corruption did not come from anonymous leaks or financial documents hidden in some banker’s drawer. They came from the testimony of Marine Master Sgt. Orly Regala Guteza — a man trained to defend the Republic, but who found himself conscripted into the sordid duty of delivering bags of dirty cash to Romualdez’s very residences.

It’s indeed poetic justice that a delivery man, the kind whom the high-and mighty like Romualdez don’t give a glance to, will be bringing down the second most powerful man in the country. For me, Guteza is more credible than the public works officials who accused senators Jinggoy Estrada, Joel Villanueva and Nancy Binay as well as former senator Bong Revilla of receiving graft money from the ghost flood control products. An ordinary man, why would he tell lies against the powerful billionaire politician?

Dirty money usually moves through layers: bagmen, go-betweens, corporate layers. This chain provided cover, keeping politicians’ hands clean while underlings absorbed the risk. But in the Marine’s account, in December 2024, he and his comrades delivered 35 pieces of luggage containing P1.7 billion coming from Romualdez’s principal graft operator, congressman Zaldy Co, directly to the speaker’s three residences, received by his aides; some even opened the bags to check their contents in several instances.

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The biggest case of corruption in our history, but silence on Marcos

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THE hypocrisy is deafening. Floodwaters have been drowning towns from Pampanga to Leyte, whistleblowers have named names, billions have vanished into “ghost” flood control projects — and yet the media, the so-called street protesters and the Yellow opposition are all pointing their fingers everywhere else except where it truly belongs: Malacañang.

This is not some legacy of the past. This is not a ghost of martial law rising again. This scam was a cancer that grew and rapidly metastasized during President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s own watch, starting in July 2022, when he handpicked Manuel Bonoan to head the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH).

From there, a flood of corruption gushed through the system, drowning public funds long before the monsoon drowned our people.

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Aquino Yellows now Marcos’ activists

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THE most shocking reality — sickening, really — that has emerged from recent tectonic political events, a revolutionary flow if I may call it, is that the political force of the Aquinos, arch enemies of dictator Marcos and viewed by many as the brains behind the assassination of Ninoy in 1983, have become Marcos Jr.’s defenders, together with the communists.

This became obvious when the Yellows quickly moved to defuse the momentum against Marcos that was spurred by revelations of massive corruption involving flood control programs, by immediately announcing their “Trillion-Peso March” at the EDSA Shrine the other day.

Its intention was to draw away outraged, nonpartisan Filipinos from the rally led by supporters of former president Rodrigo Duterte, whose daughter Vice President Sara had for months been exposing the Marcos regime’s criminal abuse of the national budget.

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