Photo: Bongbong Marcos Facebook
With the reputation of the Philippines as a country mired in corruption and ruled by insatiable cabal of politicians and graft ridden government departments and agencies there is no other way the economy will end up but bust.
The economic managers led by Ralph Recto were over-rated. Who would ever think PhilHealth and PDIC trust funds be objects of predatory schemes by characters who are supposed to secure these. We have a phrase for this: “Bantay salakay”.
This opportunism coming from the disciples of Pres. Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. set a bad example to other government functionaries. Congressmen ceased to be legislators and have become leaders and members of syndicate that had come up with a creative plot on how to transfer billions of budget allocations for government departments to graft – ridden Department of Public Works and Highways.
For the first time in the history of Philippines did Congress come up with a General Appropriations Bill that has 28 pages of blank appropriation items. It goes through the bicameral committee and voila Marcos signed it into law even as this deferred from the National Expenditure Program which his office submitted to the House of Representatives.
Marcos told the nation with a straight face saying he personally read and reviewed all 4,000 plus pages of the General Appointment Act suggesting every thing is in order even as the DPWH apparently became beneficiary of the budget hocus-pocus hatched in the House of Romualdez.
The unprecedented corruption and recent expose’ of the matrix of syndicate that involved congressmen who had a hand in crafting the budgetary appropriation, district engineers and regional officials of DPWH, contractors and subcontractors are beyond imagination. The Senate Blue Ribbon Committee investigation bares that the burglary of government treasury by the syndicate started in 2022 and up to the recent months when the scandal was unearthed.
No one investigative body can come up how many ghost and substandard flood control projects are there in the country. By all indications moreover the anomalous DPWH contracts and pilferage of the taxpayers money is countrywide. DPWH needs a total cleansing by exorcism. Corruption in the agency has become systemic.
While we now have three investigative bodies- Blue Ribbon Committee of the Senate, Infrastructure Committee of the House of Representatives and the Independent Commission on Infrastructure we still have to see any perpetrator behind bar. On the other hand, BRC head Ping Lacson resigned, star witness Orly Guteza who linked Speaker Martin Romualdez to the scandal is being threatened and ICI says its probe will be secretly conducted.
Meanwhile the former Appropriation Chairman Zaldy Co whose construction firm Sunwest turned out to be a star contractor behind anomalous projects in Mindoro, has left the country.
