P27-B projects under Romualdez in 2025 budget lacked documents — witness

A total of 444 projects worth P27.43 billion were slated under the name of former House Speaker Martin Romualdez in fiscal year 2025, none of which were supported with the required documents needed for inclusion in the national budget, an engineer said.

Engr. Peter Paul Cortez, the chief of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) Programming Division, told the Sandiganbayan Third Division on Monday that the projects were not included in the department’s annual budget proposal or the National Expenditure Program.

Cortez appeared at the anti-graft court as he was called to the witness stand in the ongoing bail hearing of Romualdez for the case of plunder over his alleged amassing of P7.4 billion in ill-gotten wealth from various infrastructure projects.

With the projects not appearing in the executive’s proposal, the court’s chairperson Associate Justice Karl Miranda asked the witness which stage in the budget process the projects could have been included.

The engineer said that it was likely that the “insertions” were made during the bicameral conference committee hearings of Congress, since the projects were also not included in the errata that the agency submitted for consideration in the General Appropriations Bill (GAB).

“Sir, my best guess, because our erratas were included in the [House General Appropriations Bill]...it was not there in the GAB,” Cortez told Miranda.

“They were the proponents, or they were the ones that asked for the project to be inserted,” he stated when asked why he tagged projects that only appear after the General Appropriations Act (GAA) was passed.

Cortez earlier stated that congressmen were placed as “proponents” for projects through the directives of the late DPWH undersecretary Cathy Cabral, for encoding into the agency’s database.

He explained that proponents were individuals who request for particular project to be funded and implemented, noting that there was nothing necessarily wrong with such a distinction.

For him, what was important was for projects to be properly vetted and that there was no problem if the same passed the said process.

It is worth noting that aside from Romualdez, he stated that there were some projects named under former congressman Zaldy Co.

Cabral’s directive

During the cross examination of Romualdez’s lawyers on the witness, Cortez said that there was no instance that individuals directly approached their office to be tagged as proponents.

All information when it comes to a project being included in the budget came directly from Cabral, either through verbal instructions or written instructions that were handed to his staff.

“Yes po...we have documentation that we were instructed to input particular proponents in the database,” he stated. “The documents that were provided to identify proponents, it was not just [Co and Romualdez], other congressmen as well, it’s a long list.”

Cortez similarly noted that he was unsure whether Romualdez had agreed to be placed as a proponent for the subject projects.

The engineer expressed that there was no one in the DPWH that could “test” the directive of Cabral and that they had no other reference when it came to project proponents aside from the instruction of the late undersecretary.

Romualdez’s bail hearing is set to resume on Tuesday, 10 November, with the prosecution set to finish its presentation of witnesses for the petition on 24 November.