The people behind the anomalous flood control projects are testing our tolerance for corruption and deceit, drowning us in all sorts of untruthful, misleading, heavily biased or manipulative narratives designed to shift the blame from one to another.
The latest of these big lies came from Zaldy Co’s supposed bombshell on Friday and Saturday, when he released on his Facebook page a two-part video message presenting a list of projects and photos showing suitcases to prove his assertion that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. had requested a P100-billion insertion in the 2025 budget through Budget Secretary Amenah Pangandaman and resigned House speaker Martin Romualdez.
Marcos purportedly got P25 billion in kickbacks, or 20% of the P100 billion budget insertion.
But the strength of Co’s assertion carried less weight when he claimed he never received any amount from the budget insertions. “Walang pera napunta sa akin, lahat ng insertion napunta sa ating Pangulo at Speaker Martin Romualdez,” the resigned AKO Bicol party-list representative said in part 2 of his video on the controversy, where he has been tagged as a central figure.
Romualdez made a similar claim on Sept. 25 following the “surprise” testimony of ex-Marine Orly Regala Guteza, a former security consultant of Co, before the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee that he delivered pieces of luggage containing millions of pesos in cash to the residences of both Co and Romualdez. “Kahit kailan, hindi ako nagnakaw ng pondo ng bayan. Hindi ko kailangan ang perang galing sa masama (I have never stolen public funds. I don’t need money from wrongdoings).”
Co’s virtual appearance last Friday surprised many. He has been out of the country since July, and his whereabouts remain unknown, as he has reportedly moved from the United States, where he was supposed to undergo medical treatment, to Europe when the flood control corruption scandal broke out in late July.
His statements implicating Marcos and Romualdez in the mangling of the 2025 budget are not new. But his narration of the president’s supposed request for a P100 billion insertion seemed ridiculous. Budget experts and academics consider it illogical for the president to course the insertion through Co when Marcos could have done so when Malacañang was drafting the budget program, before it was even submitted to Congress.
Co’s intention for coming out now is clear, and the timing is suspicious. He came out on the eve of the three-day protest rally of the Iglesia Ni Cristo and other groups allied with Vice President Sara Duterte. It was meant to bolster calls for the resignation of Marcos amid the flood control scandal, and to muddle the issues and eventually avoid conviction.
While Marcos appears sincere in getting to the bottom of the trillion-peso flood control scandal, which he brought up in his State of the Nation Address last July, his part in approving the questionable insertions in the national government budget in the first three years of his administration and the release of funds for projects that turned out to be inexistent cannot be ignored.
Perhaps the time is ripe for Marcos to acknowledge negligence and be forthright in admitting his mistakes. When he signed the 2025 budget bill into law, he said he did “an exhaustive and thorough review” of its provisions, emphasizing his role “as stewards of our taxpayers’ money seriously,” as he justified the veto of P194 billion worth of the line items that are not consistent with the administration’s programmed priorities.
Following revelations by lawmakers about potential duplicate or “copy-pasted” projects in the enacted spending program, Budget Secretary Amenah Pangandaman publicly admitted in September that it is “very difficult to scrutinize” the Department of Public Works and Highways budget proposals due to the sheer number of line items requiring professional expertise and has acknowledged that the DBM has limited technical capacity to carry out an in-depth review.
Resigned public works secretary Manuel Bonoan, undersecretaries Roberto Bernardo and Maria Catalina Cabral, as well as the dismissed district engineers, have their own versions of what and how the corruption happened. The project proponents —senators and congressmen — who allegedly demanded kickbacks of 20 to 30 percent have given their own denials and counter accusations, leaving the public perplexed and confused, not knowing anymore who and what to believe.
We’ve heard enough of their lies and excuses. We can expect those who have stolen big time to tell more tales to distract us from demanding accountability and good governance, but we should never give up. At this point, the country needs honest-to-goodness policy shifts, not a change of government.
The views in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of VERA Files.
This column also appeared in The Manila Times.
