The involvement of former occupants of the Palace’s own inner circle, the Executive Secretary’s Office and the Cabinet agency that controls the release of public funds, was a dead giveaway on who really controls the massive raid on the Treasury.
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It is a particular kind of political theater Filipinos have learned to recognize by now: The President stands at the podium, delivers his “shame on you” line to thunderous applause, and the display of outrage is spun as a demand for accountability.
A year later, the applause has faded, the cameras have moved on, and the only thing that has actually changed is who gets to keep the money.
That is the inconvenient truth lurking beneath this year’s SoNA sequel on corruption.
A member of the Independent Commission for Infrastructure (ICI), the body President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. formed to dig into the Floodgate scandal but was emasculated when it dug too deep, said some familiar names came up “very consistently” in the investigations.
Yet members of Congress, he said, “don’t sign anything; they just collect” — an apparent insulation scheme built around a simple formula: no signature, no paper trail, no accountability. Just an open palm and a closed mouth.
When the ICI, with its restrained authority, was starting to stray from the parameters set by the Marcos revelation of the top 15 contractors that cornered flood control projects and their cohorts in Congress, the Palace mood changed.
The moment threads were pulled that led toward an undersecretary’s raw 19-page ledger of who got what, coded and everything, the commission clipped the investigator’s wings.
The Palace then changed the designations of its members.
The ICI then quietly was relegated to being a referral body instead of following the trail to where it led.
It became absorbed with paperwork, with nowhere urgent to go, and was revealed as an institution engineered to look busy and give the impression that the biggest corruption racket ever in government was being investigated.
The investigator gave hints on where the dirty footprints led as he named names that were not just the usual congressional suspects.
Asked whether the scheme could have operated without approval from higher up, he said it would be worth summoning former Education Undersecretary Trygve Olaivar, who resigned on 18 November 2025, former Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin and former Budget Secretary Amenah Pangandaman.
Malacañang recently appointed Pangandaman chairperson and chief executive officer of the Al-Amanah Islamic Investment Bank of the Philippines.
The investigator added pointedly that this is “public knowledge,” which “nobody wants to talk about ... because it is an inconvenient truth.”
The involvement of former occupants of the Palace’s own inner circle, the Executive Secretary’s Office and the Cabinet agency that controls the release of public funds, was a dead giveaway on who really controls the massive raid on the Treasury.
A specific person, or persons, whose name was getting uncomfortably close to daylight through a coded ledger, just as the man reading it lost the authority to keep digging.
The Palace no longer needs to explain the flood control racket; by now, everyone knows how the funds meant for it were looted.
The marginalization of the ICI, just as it began connecting names to numbers, effectively brought the hammer down on the body’s ability to do its job.
Then came the “shame on you” episode, a roundabout way of saying nothing at all while deflecting accountability.
