THE House prosecution team in the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte said it would summon “Mary Grace Piattos” — one of the names listed as beneficiaries of Duterte’s disbursed confidential funds during her time as education secretary — to appear at the trial. Smart move on its part.
No Filipino, living or dead, answers to the name “Mary Grace Piattos,” the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) has said. By summoning a nonexistent Filipino listed as a beneficiary of Duterte’s confidential funds, along with other allegedly fictitious names, prosecutors will attempt to go into the heart of the central accusation against the vice president: her alleged utter contempt for the laws and rules meant to safeguard public funds, which, at the broader level, represents the betrayal of the Constitution itself.
And if ordinary Joes with a rudimentary sense of civic duty say “I may have heard that story of recklessness and utter contempt for the laws and rules before,” their institutional memory may be focused on contemporary events with that same level of contempt for rules involving public funds. One of them is the so-called Pharmally scam. Another is the revolting story of flood-control corruption involving construction firms owned by married contractors Curlee and Sarah Discaya. The Pharmally scam and the phenomenal rise of the Discaya couple in public-works contracting took place during the presidency of Duterte’s father, former president Rodrigo Duterte, who is now detained by the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague, the Netherlands, and awaiting trial for “crimes against humanity.”
What, in a nutshell, is the Pharmally scam, which, before the flood-control scandal spanning 2016 to mid-2025, was called the biggest official scam in history?
Pharmally Pharmaceutical Corp. was a company hastily incorporated in late 2019 with a Singaporean as majority stockholder. At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the undercapitalized Pharmally, whose general information sheet (GIS) was filled with errors — which should have raised alarm bells — went from a company with “zero income” in 2019 to one with total sales of roughly P7 billion the following year. No registered Philippine corporation has ever recorded such a miracle-level turnaround in less than a year.
This miraculous rise — one with zero income in its incorporation year to P7 billion in the next — of an undercapitalized corporation that can’t even get facts in its GIS came from supply contracts from the Department of Budget and Management’s Procurement Service (DBM-PS). That was the first wave of major supply contracts awarded to Pharmally by the DBM-PS, which was funded by a P41.6-billion jumbo fund hastily moved by the Department of Health under the guise of pandemic “emergency.” Pharmally’s incorporation — this was what probers suspected — was perfectly timed for the suspicious release of that jumbo fund.
A Senate blue ribbon inquiry later found out that the more than P11 billion in pandemic-related supplies from Pharmally were overpriced and of poor quality. A China-based construction company was the second biggest supplier after Pharmally, propping up evidence that close to P42 billion in funds were wasted in orgies of reckless use of public money.
The Sandiganbayan’s first division is now trying the graft and corruption charges related to the Pharmally scam.
It is now on record that, in terms of the amount of public funds squandered with impunity, the close-to-P42-billion Pharmally scam has been pushed to second place by a worse scandal: the flood-control corruption scam from 2016 to mid-2025, which poured pork-barrel funds worth hundreds of billions of pesos into corrupted, defective or nonexistent projects. The public face of this corruption are the multiple construction companies owned by the Discayas.
Public records available said the Discaya couple mightily “struggled” between 2005 and 2015. During those lean years, Sarah and Curlee failed to win a single significant infrastructure contract from the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH). That changed after then-president Benigno Aquino III ended his term in 2016 and Rodrigo Duterte succeeded him, and Mark Villar took over the DPWH leadership from Rogelio Singson.
Again, Senate trackers said that from 2016 to mid-2025, before the investigation into the flood-control scam began in earnest, the Discayas’ construction companies cornered P207 billion worth of public-works projects, including substantial chunks of flood-control projects. A miraculous turnaround, just like in the case of Pharmally, this time courtesy of a corrupted DPWH.
Multiple graft and corruption charges have been filed against the couple after government probers learned that their construction companies implemented projects that are fully paid but nonexistent, unfinished or substandard. It is clear that a corrupted DPWH, acting as if it were beyond accountability, enabled the rise of the Discayas.
Curlee Discaya submitted a list of lawmakers who they allegedly bribed in exchange for the pork-barrel allocations cornered by his companies via rigged public biddings. The full extent of the Discaya-related corruption saga is still unfolding.
The tactical move to summon “Mary Grace Piattos” is aimed at building a coherent narrative, backed by irrefutable evidence, that the vice president allegedly acted with total disregard for the laws and rules involving public money, which, at the broader level, also represents assaults on the Constitution itself.