WHEN the Ombudsman filed a nonbailable plunder case against Sen. Rodante Marcoleta on July 3 over an undeclared P75 million in campaign contributions, the timing alone should trouble anyone following the flood control funds scandal. Marcoleta once chaired the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee's flood control probe and has said jailing him would "bury" the investigation. Whatever one thinks of his defense, that the money was private, mishandled through "utang na loob," the optics are hard to ignore: The senator digging into a scandal implicating the highest levels of government is now the one facing prison. The law has a curious habit of finding its targets selectively.
Whose donors get rewarded, whose get raided? Let us take a look: Anton Lagdameo, who bankrolled 40 percent of Marcos Jr.'s 2022 campaign, became special assistant to the president. Melquiades Robles, who gave P30 million in cash, was made PCSO general manager — despite an earlier, acquitted graft case over an anomalous P400-million contract. No plunder charges, just appointments. In the Senate, Erwin Tulfo, an ACT-CIS representative before 2025, has said roughly 10 congress people are "dipping their toes" into government contracting. None faces what Marcoleta faces.
Interestingly too, the House of Representatives gets a pass; the Senate gets the docket. Clearly connected with the threshold of the impeachment of VP Sara Duterte. Senators are hauled before the Sandiganbayan while the House, where the so-called "allocables" actually live, goes largely untouched.
The "Cabral files," leaked by Batangas Rep. Leandro Leviste after the mysterious death of DPWH undersecretary Maria Catalina Cabral, describe a district "allocable" pool of roughly P401 billion, pushing the 2025 DPWH budget past P1 trillion — Speaker Martin Romualdez's district at P19.1 billion, the president's son Sandro Marcos's at P12.9 billion. The files' authenticity is disputed, but the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) obtained similar documents independently and found that "allocables" function as the new pork, with Romualdez and Sandro Marcos among the biggest beneficiaries. That system lives mostly in the House. So why is a party-list-turned-senator facing plunder while the House leadership, controlling hundreds of billions in insertions, faces committee hearings at worst?
And the flood control mess saw a Senate committee that keeps changing hands, right on cue. The fate of the committee investigating the scandal looks scripted. The Blue Ribbon Committee has had five changes of chairmen in under a year, nearly every handover coinciding with a fight over who controls the Senate. Marcoleta chaired it from July 2025 until Sen. Vicente Sotto's ascent to the Senate presidency triggered his removal, on the rationale that "the Blue Ribbon is reserved for the majority." Sen. Panfilo Lacson took over, resigned in October amid colleagues' pushback on his handling of the hearings, and returned in November after Tulfo's brief stint as acting chair, eventually naming Romualdez, Zaldy Co, and roughly 19 other House members as resource persons.
In May 2026, another Senate coup, installing Alan Peter Cayetano as president, triggered yet another reshuffle. Lacson was replaced by Pia Cayetano, the new president's own sister. Marcoleta, freshly indicted for plunder, and Jinggoy Estrada, charged with plunder over P573 million in alleged kickbacks, became vice chairs of the very committee meant to investigate people like them. Lacson's partial report, naming Estrada, Escudero and Villanueva for preliminary investigation, sat unsigned for 252 days.
Weeks later, a rival bloc under Sherwin Gatchalian ousted Cayetano and reshuffled the committee again. Cayetano held his own "hearing" anyway, which Malacañang dismissed as unofficial and threatened with usurpation and libel complaints, the Palace saying it would recognize only the Gatchalian bloc going forward. The executive branch was, in effect, deciding who runs the legislature's own oversight committee. Cayetano accused Lacson of "colluding with the administration" to target senators like Estrada and Villanueva while burying findings pointing toward Malacañang. Sen. Imee Marcos was blunter: The intent, she said, was to make the Senate "a rubber stamp" out of fear of what a real Blue Ribbon probe would reveal.
These senators agree on little else, but the churn tells its own story: a body with subpoena power over the country's biggest corruption scandal reorganized five times in 11 months, each time landing with whichever bloc has Malacañang's blessing and, most recently, in the hands of senators who are themselves subjects of the probe. Imee Marcos, who finished 12th in 2025, has become one of the sharpest internal critics of this pattern, warning of Charter change moves meant to protect allies ahead of 2028. Her presence at the Iglesia ni Cristo rally last week for Marcoleta, beside Cayetano, suggests even senators in the ruling family's orbit see the case as an effort to neutralize oversight, not clean up government.
The flood control mess is just the surface. Marcoleta's case is only the visible layer. Reporting this year has surfaced a document allegedly showing legislators offered budget items from Department of Agriculture’s Farm-to-Market Roads program; DepEd and NIA line items; and DOH's Medical Assistance to Indigent Patients program (MAIP) — flagged by budget watchers as "soft pork" for how loosely it's disbursed. The DPWH admits building only 22 of 1,700 targeted classrooms in a year while billions in "red-flagged" school and irrigation projects sit unexamined. If the flood control pattern of kickbacks reportedly running 25 to 30 percent of contract value holds across these agencies, plunder cases confined to a handful of senators are not accountability. They are triage: sacrifice a visible target, protect the rest of the machine.
The economy is paying for it. Public construction spending contracted roughly 31 to 42 percent year-on-year through late 2025 into 2026, dragging GDP growth to its slowest pace outside the pandemic. That is the price of corruption — but selective prosecution that spares the House while jailing senators is not the cure. It is the same disease wearing the mask of justice.
The Ombudsman says that the Marcoleta case rests on undisputed facts and that the law applies "regardless of who is involved." Weigh that against the pattern above.
