NBI hits right buttons
Layered on top of that is a smaller, more specific item, which is the P50-million cost of the 50-meter cauldron used in the opening ceremonies
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Layered on top of that is a smaller, more specific item, which is the P50-million cost of the 50-meter cauldron used in the opening ceremonies
Timing is everything in politics, and National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) Director Melvin Matibag has either terrible or perfect timing, depending on which senator is involved and the alleged scandal he is pursuing.
Matibag announced this week that his agency was looking into roughly P10 billion in unliquidated funds tied to the New Clark City sports complex, the venue built for the 2019 Southeast Asian Games.
No bidding took place, he said. The money moved through a congressional insertion in the General Appropriations Act (GAA). And, incidentally, the person who chaired the organizing committee for the Games happened to be the then Speaker of the House of Representatives, who went by the initials APC.
The core figure under scrutiny is P10 billion, the amount Matibag said was paid to Malaysian contractor MTD Capital Berhad for the New Clark City sports complex through a congressional insertion in the GAA, without a competitive bidding and without proper liquidation.
Layered on top of that was a smaller, more specific item: the P50-million cost of the 50-meter cauldron used in the opening ceremonies, which Matibag flagged separately as something the NBI will also probe.
Senator Alan Peter Cayetano did not take this well. Neither did his sister, Senator Pia Cayetano, nor Senator Robin Padilla, who wondered aloud whether the impeachment court was even free from intimidation anymore.
Cayetano’s line was patented: “Investigate whatever you want, do it quietly, because announcing it now wrecks the integrity of the court.”
He even dusted off his old Senate president catchphrase about not being knocked down.
Unmoved, Matibag said it was all incidental; he only stumbled onto the documents while scouting for land for an NBI academy. Coincidences like that deserve a raised eyebrow, but a raised eyebrow is not evidence of a crime.
Lawyer Egon Cayosa, former president of the Integrated Bar of the Philippines, backed the NBI’s pursuit of the unresolved allegations, saying this was not a new case but an ongoing one.
Cayosa’s point is that the SEA Games mess had been sitting in a drawer, unresolved, for years, and the NBI merely reopened it. If it is genuinely active and genuinely old, there is nothing procedurally wrong with pursuing it, whatever the political mood is.
Cayetano raised the intimidation card, connecting the fresh scrutiny to Matibag’s taking the witness stand in the impeachment trial next week.
The senator-judge can be forgiven for smelling a setup, but he cannot wave away a legitimate investigation just because the calendar is inconvenient. That is not how accountability works. It is not supposed to wait politely for a better political cycle.
The controversy stemmed from the creation of the Philippine Southeast Asian Games Organizing Committee (Phisgoc), which was formed in mid-2018 under the Philippine Olympic Committee, then was quietly incorporated as a private, non-stock, non-profit foundation, a structure its officials said followed International Olympic Committee practice.
Then Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea’s Memorandum Circular 56, issued in January 2019, directed all government agencies and local government units to support the memorandum circular.
Being a private entity bought Phisgoc an exemption from the government’s public bidding rules, even as it handled billions in public money, including a P1.5-billion transfer explicitly carved out of the bidding requirements.
Senator Franklin Drilon flagged this arrangement back in 2019, asking the obvious question: Why was a private entity spending public funds without the usual guardrails? Nobody had a satisfying answer then. Nobody has one now either.
The revival of the probe is less about Matibag playing games with his timing — he might be a little — but whether an organizing committee that spent public billions outside the normal bidding system ever got properly examined. Law veteran Cayosa is right that reviving an old case is not misconduct.
The people are owed an explanation, not the senator-judges, who are merely worried about their political timetable.
The people are the taxpayers who funded a two-week sporting event and never got a clean accounting of where the money actually went.
It was Senator Cayetano who said “investigate away.” Somebody, finally, seems willing to take him up on it.
