One Year After the Flood-Control Speech: Probes, Protests, and the President’s Possible Culpability

By Guinevere Latoza

Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism

One year after President Marcos shamed officials and contractors whom he said stole from  government-funded flood-control projects, the country has yet to come to grips with the scale of the thievery and who, at the highest levels of power, were responsible.

The amounts involved are staggering. Senator Panfilo Lacson, who led the Senate’s probe on flood control projects, estimated that about P180 billion allocated for flood control had been diverted to ghost projects since 2016. He added that even before construction, up to 60% of the allocated funds had already been lost to corruption.

But that’s not all. Government engineers revealed during congressional hearings that lawmakers got kickbacks from nearly all public works projects, including roads, streetlighting, multipurpose buildings, and more.

According to Greenpeace, as much as P1 trillion could have been lost to graft in flood control and other projects tagged as mitigating the impact of climate change. And that’s just for 2023 to 2025.

Congressional probes in the past year showed that such thievery was possible only because the country’s public works delivery system operated like organized crime, with legislators, Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) officials, and contractors colluding to steal from the country’s coffers even as ordinary Filipinos suffered from devastating floods each typhoon season.

The investigations showed how lawmakers and executive officials inserted public works projects in the national budget on the condition that they would receive kickbacks from those projects. DPWH engineers acted as go-betweens with public works contractors who offered to pay kickbacks to secure government contracts. The same engineers collected the payoffs and got a small share for themselves; later, they delivered the balance—in cash and packed in suitcases—to the aides of the legislators who were the project proponents. These deliveries took place in the parking lots of posh hotels or lawmakers’ homes in some of Manila’s most exclusive villages.

In the weeks following last year’s SONA, angry citizens pelted mud at the properties of notorious DPWH contractors Pacifico and Sara Discaya. Then, they protested in front of Congress, raged on the streets of Manila, marched to EDSA, and mounted rallies in several parts of the country to air their main demand: put all the culprits behind bars, regardless of their grip on power and political color.

“Mahiya naman kayo!” President Marcos said during his State of the Nation Address in Congress. But is shaming enough? And will the president, who started it all, also be ensnared in the ever-widening scandal?

In this piece, we follow the trail of accountability in the largest corruption scandal in recent Philippine memory.

1. Who are being charged in court?

Based on our tally from publicly available records and announcements, at least 45 are currently facing charges in the Sandiganbayan and various regional trial courts. Two are current members of Congress, another two are former lawmakers, 33 are former DPWH officials, eight are contractors.

First to take the hit was former Ako Bicol Rep. and House appropriations committee chairperson Elizaldy Co, currently at large, but who has been slapped with graft and malversation charges for an alleged substandard road dike project in Mindoro. The Sandiganbayan issued warrants of arrest for him and officials from DPWH Region IV-B in November 2025 after the Office of the Ombudsman brought the case to the anti-graft court.

In December, the Lapu-Lapu City Regional Trial Court issued warrants of arrest for contractor Sarah Discaya, her niece who is also a contractor, and DPWH officials over an alleged ghost flood-control project in Davao Occidental.

Uswag Ilonggo Rep. James “Jojo” Ang Jr. is the latest individual that the Office of the Ombudsman has prosecuted due to conflict of interest over public works contracts. Ang is linked to two Iloilo-based public works contractors according to a Rappler investigation.

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Four individuals have so far been admitted to the state witness protection program. Three are former DPWH officials and one is a Bulacan-based contractor alleged to have fraudulent flood-control projects.

• Roberto Bernardo (former DPWH undersecretary)
• Henry Alcantara (former district engineer, Bulacan 1st District Engineering Office)
• Gerald Opulencia (former regional director, DPWH-National Capital Region)
• Sally Santos (contractor, SYMS Construction Trading)

In June, the Ombudsman said it wanted to make former DPWH Secretary Manuel Bonoan a state witness.

2. Who are still undergoing investigation?

At least 43 more individuals are either being investigated by the Office of the Ombudsman, had been referred by the Independent Commission for Infrastructure (ICI) to the investigating body for further investigation, or both.

Three of these are sitting senators, two are former senators, four are aides of former and sitting senators, eight are sitting congresspersons, two are ex-congresspersons, one is a Commission on Audit commissioner, three are contractors, eight are private individuals linked to Leyte representative and presidential cousin Martin Romualdez, and the rest are DPWH officials.

Thus far, Romualdez is one of the highest-level officials being investigated by the Ombudsman’s office. In a complaint-affidavit filed on July 20, Ombudsman investigators accused Romualdez of receiving P56 billion pesos worth of payoffs from government projects between 2022 to and 2025, or when he was still House Speaker.

The complaint was based on information Co made public on Facebook and also on congressional testimony from his former bodyguards who claimed they delivered the cash in luggage to Romualdez’s aides.

Ombudsman Jesus Crispin Remulla said that his office continues to look into all those recommended for further investigation by the ICI. Marcos had formed the three-member commission in September in order to probe failed public works projects since 2016.

The commission lasted just seven months, with most hearings held behind closed doors, and submitted all its findings to the Office of the Ombudsman on March 13 this year; it concluded its activities on March 31.

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Dizon, who took the helm of the DPWH in September 2025, also filed complaints against engineers and staff of the Bulacan 1st District Engineering Office and two contractors before the Ombudsman. In November last year, Dizon and the ICI jointly recommended the filing of criminal charges against eight congressmen who have ties with contractors.

The Department of Justice, meanwhile, said that as of March this year, it was handling 24 active cases related to the corruption scandal but did not elaborate on the personalities involved in each one.

The larger question, however, is this: The 2026 budget enacted after the flood-control scandal drastically reduced the funding for flood-control projects. But it still contains hundreds of millions worth of “allocables,” amounts allocated for various projects in congressional districts over which lawmakers have a say. Allocables, as PCIJ reported, are the new pork—and they remain a tempting honeypot for graft.

3. Is President Marcos also culpable?

In November 2025, Co, who is believed to be hiding somewhere in Europe, posted a video on Facebook claiming that he had personally delivered P1 billion worth of bribes to Justice Undersecretary Jojo Cadiz. The long-time aide of Marcos supposedly received the money on behalf of the president on two separate occasions in December 2024 in a house in South Forbes Park. The delivery, said Co, was made under Romualdez’s instructions. This amount, he added, is part of the P56 billion he collected for the former House speaker from 2022 to 2025.

Cadiz offered his resignation in December to the president following the allegations but remains in his post. The Ombudsman said it would “look into” the undersecretary’s possible involvement in the corruption scheme.

Co also alleged that it was former Budget Secretary Amenah Pangandaman who instructed him to insert P100 billion worth of projects into the 2025 national budget. Presidential Legislative Liaison Office Undersecretary Adrian Bersamin supposedly gave him the list of projects at the Aguado Residence in Malacañang in late 2024.

Days after Co’s video revelations, Lacson, then the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee chairperson, claimed during a plenary session in November 2025 that such an insertion was indeed made. But he absolved the president and asserted that Bersamin, in cahoots with then-Education Undersecretary Trygve Olaivar, “misrepresented” Marcos and took the kickbacks from the projects worth P8 billion.

In January 2026, Olaivar was invited to the Senate Blue Ribbon committee, but was not queried about the kickbacks. Meanwhile, Bersamin has never been invited to any hearings because of a rule where only matters divulged during the committee hearings can be tackled.

In March, members of progressive groups urged the Ombudsman to probe Olaivar and Bersamin for possibly violating the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act and the Code of Conduct and Ethical Standard of Public Officers, and committing grave misconduct. There have been no public updates on the complaint.

Pangandaman, Bersamin and his granduncle Lucas Bersamin, the former executive secretary, all resigned from their posts after Co’s allegations. On July 14, Marcos appointed Pangandaman as chairperson and chief executive officer of the state-owned Al-Amanah Islamic Investment Bank, the country’s first Islamic bank even if Ombudsman Remulla said she is still “in their universe” of investigations.

Marcos denied claims that he is involved in public works corruption. “E kung talagang raket ko yun, bakit ko sisirain yung raket ko, diba? That makes absolutely no sense,” he insisted in a July 4 press briefing.

But it was his administration which introduced a new pork barrel system that provided a formula for distributing DPWH projects that became kickback sources for lawmakers and other government officials.

These so-called allocables are funds assigned to legislative districts based on what’s known as the BBM Parametric Formula that only the late Public Works Undersecretary, Catalina Cabral, supposedly understood.

BBM stands for “Baselined, Balanced and Managed.” It also happens to be the popular nickname of the president. Our investigation found that presidential son Ilocos Norte Rep. Sandro Marcos and Romualdez’s districts got the bulk of allocable funds from 2023 to 2025.

Meanwhile, “non-allocables” consist of DPWH’s core projects but, in essence, have become free-for-all pork projects of lawmakers and executive officials, and actively pursued by contractors.

Dizon promised to scrap the formula in time for the 2027 budget. “For 2027 moving forward,  we’re definitely going to review all these processes, all these formulae because these cannot continue,” he said.

Remulla admitted that much work has yet to be done. “Malungkot sabihin pero maliit pa lang ang nailagay natin sa hustisya,” he said in a press briefing two weeks before the president’s 2026 SONA. “Pero hindi naman kami tumitigil,” he added.

This year’s anti-corruption protests have waned compared to last year. More than 100,000 people took part in the September 21, 2025 protests and around 90,000 protesters across the country participated in the November 30 rallies.

The most recent protest action against corruption on June 28 drew only 3,600 attendees. But the call for accountability remains.

“Hindi tayo maaring manahimik habang ninanakaw ang pondo sa mahihirap. Hindi tayo maaring manahimik habang ang kaban ng bayan ay ginagawang personal na kayamanan ng iilan!” said Kidapawan Bishop Jose Bagaforo during the White Ribbon March in June.

“Kung may nagnakaw sa bayan, dapat panagutin! Kung may kurakot, dapat ikulong! Walang exempted, walang VIP, walang makapangyarihan o mahirap, walang kaalyado o walang kalaban. Ang batas ay dapat pairalin sa lahat sapagkat ang tunay na katarungan ay walang pinipili,” the bishop said.—PCIJ.org