PUBLIC Works Secretary Vince Dizon said Tuesday that the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) has found irregularities in some projects in Taguig City, but noted it was too early to label them as ghost projects.
Dizon said an initial report on the investigation has been forwarded to the Office of the Ombudsman.
During a recent Senate hearing, Dizon said that the DPWH had so far identified 10 ghost projects nationwide, but none of those 10 was located in Taguig.
“The investigation in Taguig, we have just started and it’s still ongoing,” Dizon said, noting the initial report mentioned discrepancies involving geographical coordinates, including one that pointed to an area in Leyte.
The projects, he added, involved payments to contractor St. Timothy Construction Corp., owned by embattled couple Curlee and Sarah Discaya.
“We have to validate. That needs to be compared with various documents and also verified on site,” he said, noting investigations are not limited to Taguig, with similar probes being conducted in Davao, Cebu, Bulacan and Iloilo.
Dizon declined to make a definitive statement when asked whether Davao City had ghost projects.
He said in Davao Occidental, a ghost project had already been confirmed and those implicated arrested.
For the Taguig projects, he said the initial findings were enough to warrant further scrutiny.
Sen. Panfilo Lacson thanked Dizon for saying that flood control projects in Taguig City remain under investigation for alleged irregularities.
“Thank you, Sec. Vince, for the clarification. I agree that preliminary inspection findings on several questionable flood control projects in Taguig — such as those on St. Timothy’s slope protection project — do not automatically prove a project was ‘ghosted,’ but we also cannot definitively conclude that no ‘ghost projects’ exist,” Lacson said in a social media post.
Lacson said the reports, prepared by the DPWH, showed that several flood control projects had been declared completed, but their physical presence at the sites could not be validated by inspection teams for various reasons.
In some areas, he said, inspection teams could not verify potentially anomalous projects because they had been covered by newer projects.
He cited the DPWH’s analysis of potentially similar billing photographs from Taguig projects from 2017 to 2025. Of 15,523 images processed using an AI-based image similarity detection system, 1,079 pairs were flagged for high visual similarity, involving 180 unique contracts.
Over the weekend, Lacson disclosed details of a “Slope Protection along Taguig River Project” (Contract ID 220B0106), whose geotagged billing photos contained coordinates pointing to Leyte province, about 600 kilometers from Taguig.
Records showed three locations in Tacloban City reflected in the photographs. They also showed that the DPWH paid St. Timothy Construction Corp., owned by the Discaya family, about P96.5 million for the project.
Lacson said the St. Timothy project was not an isolated case but the most “brazen and telling” so far among some 68 projects where DPWH inspection teams had identified red flags.
