(Note: thumbnail image for this column was produced with the help of Google Gemini.)
The revelation by Interior Secretary Jonvic Remulla about the construction of a five-level basement vault in the Forbes Park home of former Ako Bicol Party-list representative Zaldy Co makes us wonder if he got the idea of having an underground storage place to keep his loot from the Korean drama, Vincenzo.
In an interview with Karen Davila on ANC on Dec. 23, Remulla said the structure was not designed for parking. “It’s not for cars. It’s for money,” he said flatly.
Co, now a fugitive and reported to be in Portugal, chaired the powerful House Appropriations Committee from 2022 to 2025.
Remulla said with the enormous amount that Co accumulated from government funds through fraudulent means, “there’s no way he could deposit that in Philippine banks.”
The house design, Remulla said, and accounts from construction workers suggest the basement vault was intended for cash storage. Fire, after all, spreads upward. So the money was to be kept at the lowest point of the house, fully waterproofed, to survive both flames and floods. “They made it water proof to make it safe,” Remulla added.
Co and his brother co-own several construction firms, most notably Sunwest Corporation, which has been repeatedly linked to ghost and substandard flood control projects. The same firm has also been tagged in the anomalous P8-billion Pharmally contract and the P2.4-billion overpriced laptop deal for the Department of Education during the term of Vice President Sara Duterte.
There is no official accounting of Co’s alleged loot, but unverified estimates put it at as much as P100 billion.
Even as Co’s lawyer, Ruy Rondain, denies the existence of an underground cash vault, Remulla said the property is now subject to civil forfeiture proceedings.
Had Co not been exposed, the challenges would not have ended with the construction. Who would have access to the vault—and how? How does one guarantee absolute secrecy when architects, engineers, construction workers, and IT specialists are inevitably involved?
This, incidentally, is the central problem explored in the Korean drama Vincenzo.
In Vincenzo, the story revolves around Vincenzo Cassano, played by Song Joong-ki, an Italian mafia consigliere who attempts to retrieve 1.5 tons of gold bars hidden in a high-tech underground vault beneath an aging commercial building in Seoul.
The gold bars, owned by Chinese tycoon Wang Shaolin, was concealed beneath a Buddhist temple in Geumga Plaza, in an operation executed by Vincenzo and his Seoul-based associate Mr. Woo.
Aside from the gold bars, there was also something valuable kept in that vault: the Guillotine Files, a list complete with incriminating evidence of the behind-the-scenes dealings of powerful politicians contained in a USB.
The vault was designed by an IT specialist – piano teacher who was one of the tenants of Geumga Plaza. It could only be opened by scanning Wang Shaolin’s biometric iris. Any attempt to force entry would trigger the collapse of the building, burying both gold and the Guillotine files forever. To ensure complete secrecy, the workers who built the vault and moved the gold were all killed. Or so they thought.
The plot complication arises when Wang Shaolin died suddenly of a heart attack in China. How Vincenzo ultimately retrieves the gold bars becomes the highlight of the 20-episode hit K-drama series.
Fiction or non-fiction, same takeaways.
Vincenzo is fiction. The alleged plunder of public funds attributed to Co is not.
Yet both point to the same enduring truth: there is no such thing as a permanent secret. No matter how deep the vault, how advanced the technology, or how powerful the people involved, the truth has a way of surfacing.
As history has shown time and again, there is no perfect crime. Truth, like water, always finds a way to come out.
The views in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of VERA Files.