Don’t shoot messengers
The suitcase story needs to be investigated, not demolished, amid a wave of coordinated attacks by allies of those who have been implicated.
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The suitcase story needs to be investigated, not demolished, amid a wave of coordinated attacks by allies of those who have been implicated.
Instead of the big fish and their cohorts in the massive raid on the National Treasury that is the Floodgate scandal, it is the supposed whistleblowers who tasted jail.
All 10 members of the so-called “Maleta Boys” were placed behind bars overnight after they failed to post bail on Friday. They were released around 1:10 p.m. yesterday after forking out a total of P720,000, or P72,000 each, for their temporary liberty.
On 24 February 2026, 18 men who identified themselves as former Marines, who were later referred as the Maleta Boys, held a press briefing. With lawyer Levito Baligod beside them, they said they had worked as security aides and “bagmen” for fugitive former Congressman Zaldy Co.
Part of their job, they claimed, was to deliver suitcases, paper bags, and envelopes stuffed with cash to some of the country’s most powerful people, including President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., former House Speaker Martin Romualdez and a long list of Congress members and Executive officials.
They said the money came from the flood control corruption scheme. Their sworn statement, filed with the Ombudsman on 28 February, put the total kickbacks at P805 billion.
What happened next was not an investigation into their revelations but a wave of lawsuits.
Within days, the men who had named names became defendants themselves. National Security Adviser Eduardo Año filed the first complaint — for unlawful publication and unlawful utterances.
Then came Antonio Trillanes IV, and to complete the cast of executioners, Leila de Lima. All of them filed cyberlibel and perjury complaints against the 18 men and their lawyer.
By late July, the Department of Justice had approved multiple counts of cyberlibel and perjury against the 18 men and their lawyer, calling their claims “unquestionably defamatory.”
Their status may have faced real problems since the Navy said four of them were never in the service, while most of the rest had been dishonorably discharged, but the pattern of their persecution that followed pointed to a conspiracy to silence the men.
A sworn statement was filed with the Ombudsman, a constitutional body that investigates such claims, but the response was not mainly a fact-finding but a coordinated legal barrage from almost every person the statement named.
That is what “shooting the messenger” means: instead of asking whether the claim is true, the response is to sue the person who made it into silence.
Then came the money. Four of the 18 suddenly took back their testimony against Marcos, Romualdez, and Co. Their former colleague, George Villalon Jr., said something out loud that many suspected.
He and his colleagues, he said, had been offered between P20 million and P25 million to switch sides.
The four who recanted spoke on television with their faces hidden, saying they were “just scared” and wanted to “live quietly.”
The suitcase story needs to be investigated, not demolished, amid a wave of coordinated attacks by allies of those who have been implicated.
A wall of libel suits filed by the very officials named, before a single hearing has tested the allegations, followed by reports of multimillion-peso offers to make inconvenient witnesses disappear, only fuels the perception of a whitewash.
A whistleblower buried in lawsuits and then allegedly paid to change his story sends a warning to every future witness who might seek to expose a racket reaching into the highest levels of the administration.
The suitcases may or may not have been real. But the pressure brought to bear on the men who described them raises a far more disturbing question: Is there a concerted effort to keep the truth from coming out?
