Investment Ombudsman, anyone?
An economy built on padded contracts, ghost projects, and kickbacks is not a strong economy. It is running on borrowed time.
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An economy built on padded contracts, ghost projects, and kickbacks is not a strong economy. It is running on borrowed time.
The Office of the Ombudsman does not work in a vacuum. Every case we file, every account we cause to be frozen, and every headline about the flood control scandal reaches beyond the courtroom into boardrooms, trading floors and construction sites. We know this, and we will not pretend otherwise.
The effects on the economy have been real. When the scale of the flood control anomalies surfaced in 2025, infrastructure spending slowed as agencies reviewed contracts and held back releases. Public construction contracted sharply in the third quarter and GDP growth fell to 4.0 percent, the weakest in over four years.
The stock market slid to five-year lows, and the peso weakened toward record levels. Contractors whose accounts were frozen stopped work, and their suppliers, subcontractors, and workers felt it too. Investors, local and foreign, waited to see how deep the rot went.
Yet it had to be done. An economy built on padded contracts, ghost projects, and kickbacks is not a strong economy. It is running on borrowed time and the bill eventually comes due, often as floods drown the communities those projects were meant to protect. Letting that continue for the sake of short-term growth figures would have been the greater harm. Some things have to get worse before they get better.
But accountability cannot be our only contribution. Businesses need more than the assurance that wrongdoers will be punished. They need a reliable way to raise problems before those problems become scandals. That is why the Office is now designing an Investment Ombudsman.
Its mandate will be clear. It will take up the biggest and most common concerns of the business community: permits held hostage, requests for “facilitation,” selective enforcement, contracts steered to the well-connected and officials who simply refuse to act.
As long as the act, or the failure to act, can be considered corruption or graft, the Investment Ombudsman will attend to it. The goal is to give investors a direct line to an institution with the power to investigate and prosecute, not another desk that only forwards complaints.
We do not intend to design this office alone. We are engaging business chambers, industry associations, foreign investors, civil society and other stakeholders to learn what they actually need. We need to know which complaints recur, where the bottlenecks are, how quickly they need answers and what protection private-sector whistleblowers require.
Their input will shape how the office is staffed, how cases are triaged and how its results are measured.
The past year showed what it costs to clean house. The next should show what the country gained from it.
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