Davao Rep. Paolo “Pulong” Duterte on Tuesday blasts ACT Teachers Party-list Rep. Antonio Tinio, accusing him of staging “political theater” after the latter flagged billions of pesos in alleged irregularities in Davao City’s flood control projects.

In a statement, Duterte dismissed Tinio’s allegations as “selective outrage” intended to antagonize the Duterte family.

“Why focus solely on Davao while conveniently ignoring the larger controversies hounding the present administration and its allies?” Duterte said, accusing Tinio of using the issue to distract from what he described as the teacher-solon’s primary mandate to defend educators’ welfare.

Tinio, however, has stood by his findings. He earlier filed an independent complaint before the Office of the Ombudsman, flagging 80 flood-control contracts worth an estimated P4.35 billion for alleged serious anomalies. 

Citing data from the Department of Public Works and Highways, Tinio reported patterns of “red flags” including supposed ghost projects, double funding for the same river sections, incomplete construction, and contracts awarded with vague or missing specifications.

Among the irregularities he cited were two overlapping river-control contracts worth P135.14 million and several projects where the actual completed length was significantly shorter than what had been funded. 

Tinio further claimed that P4.07 billion of the projects he identified were congressional insertions absent from the original National Expenditure Program.

Duterte has countered by asserting that Davao City has received “zero budget” for four years and claims that the P49.84 billion in infrastructure built from 2020 to 2022 demonstrates high performance and transparency. 

National figures, however, indicate a much larger flow of public works funding. 

In September 2025, a senior DPWH official confirmed that Duterte’s 1st District received at least P51 billion in allocations during the final three years of the administration of former president Rodrigo Duterte.

Tinio maintained that as the district’s representative, Duterte must account for the questionable allocations and implementation lapses uncovered in the public works data.

But Duterte insists Tinio ignores the long-term engineering constraints behind flood mitigation.

“Flooding is a national problem requiring serious engineering, long-term planning, and cooperation among agencies — not grandstanding before cameras and carrying stacks of folders to create headlines,” Duterte said.