THE Senate Blue Ribbon Committee was desperately seeking enough signatures to pass the P42 billion Pharmally scam report at the committee level until the dying days of the Rodrigo Duterte administration but miserably failed. So it came to pass that one of the most comprehensive Senate investigations of official corruption in history — and involving a mind-boggling amount that made the P10 billion Napoles scam look like a penny ante operations — was sent into the archives to gather dust.
The tortured civic lesson imparted by the failed effort to give official imprimatur to a report that exposed the darkest underbellies of official corruption, starting with the release of a P42 billion from the already strained coffers of the Department of Health to an obscure procurement agency seemingly predisposed to lose all that money in orgies of corrupt purchases, was clear: Carrying out that unprecedented act of stealing public money may not even lead to accountability.
That Pharmally, an undercapitalized company hastily registered in 2019 and couldn’t even get the facts in its general information sheet (GIS) right, cornered P11 billion of the P42 billion Covid supply contracts was the central story of that mind-boggling level of official corruption. But if you parse the details of Pharmally’s Covid-supply contracts, from waiving all the standard bid and inspection requirements plus the explicit directive to clear all shipments upon arrival at the ports no matter how defective, you will see to what reckless degree the Government Procurement Act was summarily set aside to fast-track the plunder of already-limited Covid-containment funds.
In the sad annals of government corruption, nothing as brazen had been done before. The Pharmally scam was peak audacity of state-sponsored thievery. The nation had yet to recover from the horrors of the Pharmally saga when the Senate inquiry into the fake citizenship of ousted Bamban, Tarlac Mayor Alice Guo, this time under the Marcos Jr. administration, found out another stomach-curling discovery. That part of the proceeds from the Pharmally scam was reinvested into the POGOs that were hosted by the land development company partly owned by the fake Filipino citizen Guo. Dark money naturally finding its way into POGOs.
The Pharmally scam has yet to have its proper closure. Rodrigo Duterte, the president under whose watch the brazen stealing of public money took place and was identified as the official who approved the release of the P42 billion from the DOH, was not granted a peaceful, hassle-free, post-presidential retirement either. A peaceful retirement that is standard for former presidents of the realm. After a change in government, the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) efforts to arrest Duterte and put him on trial at The Hague for alleged “crimes against humanity” gained momentum. The operative verb here is “kill.” Duterte and a bunch of his so-called “co-perpetrators” were allegedly responsible for the murder of people under his bloody war on drugs. Duterte is now awaiting trial at The Hague.
A warrant of arrest has been issued against Sen. Ronald “Bato” de la Rosa, Duterte’s former Philippine National Police (PNP) chief and named as one of the “co-perpetrators.” Even with his detention, the shadow of Rodrigo Duterte looms large over the country and the dark legacies of his administration continue to haunt the nation.
In a post-SONA 2025 disclosure, President Marcos Jr. exposed a corruption bombshell, a corruption of such unprecedented magnitude that erased the Pharmally scam as the biggest act of official corruption in history and relegated that Covid-era scam to distant second. Marcos Jr. said that 15 construction companies cornered roughly P100 billion of mostly corrupted flood control projects from 2016 to mid-2025, out of the P500 billion total flood control funds allocated during that same period. By his own admission, the six years under the Duterte administration, with the corruption extending up to two and a half years of his presidency.
Anti-corruption probers are still sorting out through the monumental wreckage but this is a summation of what had been discovered and what actions have been undertaken by the justice system. An incumbent senator, Jinggoy Estrada, is in jail for his alleged involvement in the flood control corruption and so is a former senator, Ramon “Bong” Revilla Jr. Senators Francis Escudero and Joel Villanueva and many incumbent members of the House of Representatives led by former speaker Martin Romualdez, are also currently being probed. Allegedly complicit — and about to be criminally charged — are officials of the Department of Public Works and Highways and private contractors.
The private contractors that have been the face of the sickening saga are former party-list representative Zaldy Co and the couple Pacifico and Sarah Discaya. Co, formerly the head of the House committee on appropriations, has linked Marcos Jr. to the anomaly alleging that the president himself had received kickbacks from the scam.
Public attention that used to be focused on the flood control corruption investigation has shifted to another major issue, the ongoing impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte. The House of Representatives overwhelmingly impeached the Duterte princeling for alleged “betrayal of the country’s laws, the Constitution and public trust” and for threatening to kill Marcos Jr., First Lady Liza Araneta Marcos and former speaker Romualdez.
If one cuts through the legalese of the trial, the charges can be summed up in two words: kill and steal.
The two words that have been the tragic preoccupation of polity all through much of our contemporary history.
