MANILA, Philippines — Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano on Friday denied Sen. Panfilo Lacson’s allegation that there were ghost flood control projects in Taguig, saying these have been inspected multiple times to the best of their knowledge.
On his Facebook livestream, Cayetano said initial checks on city projects showed no evidence of ghost infrastructure and that all works went through proper bidding and validation.
"Well, the allegations are general. They said there is a ghost project in Taguig and we've checked. Remember, the national projects are from the national government. Theoretically, the senator, congressman should have nothing to do with it," Cayetano said.
"But of course, we saw there in the Blue Ribbon Committee that there was indeed a conspiracy or interference. Having said that, I do as a habit check as much as I can projects," he added.
Cayetano also said that investigations had been conducted and that no ghost flood control projects were found in Taguig.
"Because when this scandal exposed, to my knowledge, many national government officials have already looked into it—especially in Metro Manila, given the case of the Discaya Group, for instance. So, all over the country. That's why, when it first came out, I said, everything should be investigated. So, in our preliminary investigations, we didn't see any ghosts," Cayetano said.
"The ones we saw had problems, we reported it earlier, that's why no less than the top DPWH officials from the regional to the national level have inspected some of the projects that have problems and we haven't hesitated to say, this is what was done wrong, this is why this is happening, this has been going on for a long time," he added.
