Maine Mendoza is back on TV5’s Eat Bulaga! since 25 September and she has stopped defending in her social media accounts the reputation of her actor-congressman husband Arjo Atayde. 

The hubby is included in the first set of politicians embroiled by the contractor couple Sarah and Curlee Discaya as receiving money from them in return for the release of funds for flood control infrastucture projects awarded to them by the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) through rigged biddings (the others that the couple alleged to have received millions of pesos cash from them are Senators Jinggoy Estrada and Joel Villanueva, and ex-Senator Bong Revilla). 

The Discayas own nine construction companies mostly with dummy owners, thus often allowing their clan to be the only bidders for a project. 

Mendoza was more vehement than Atayde himself in proclaiming to the world about his being an upright citizen, following relentless attacks by some netizens on his character. Seemingly unable to take the bashing against Atayde, she stopped turning up at Eat Bulaga! and no one there bothered to explain her disappearance. The show’s fans knew why, of course. 

The gods may be taking pity these days on the extremely upset congressman’s wife. She can hold her peace, she doesn’t have to rant now in defense of her congressman as the drift of the “floodgate” hearings at the Senate is mainly towards the senators themselves and other government officials, now including the Budget Department. 

And for some reason, Atayde’s name is not in the lists of personalities the Department of Justice has filed cases connected to the country’s “floodgate” anomalies, which are proving to be abysmally pervasive. Even former high-ranking government
officials — resigned or retired supposedly with uncorrupted service record — are now linked to the muddy flow of easy-to-steal funds from the Filipino people’s taxes. 

Mendoza reportedly took a vacation abroad during her almost a full week of absence from Eat Bulaga!. Where she flew remains undisclosed as of this writing — if she did leave at all. It is possible that the husband may have joined her if they left before the government issued a hold order against the moneyed citizens unwittingly trapped in the country’s “floodgate.” 

But even as Mendoza is back on Eat Bulaga!, some fans of the noontime fare find her not as bubbly as before. After all, the dearest hubby has not been pronounced innocent of the accusation of demanding cash from the Discaya couple — and quietly receiving it through her husband’s father, businessman Arthur Atayde, who was jailed for two years in the early 1990s for cases in kidnap-for-ransom, carnapping, and murder. Arjo was a mere infant at that time and his parents were to marry legally only in 2004 when they already had several children. 

The couple are now trapped,  just like us (the public), in a flood of waiting for the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee to conclude their avowed task of discovering the modus operandi of anomalies so they can get better at crafting legislations for this archipelago of a million-plus people. Hopefully, the waiting does not doom us into a paralysis.