Romualdez out: The beginning of the end for Marcos
THE ouster of presidential cousin Martin Romualdez as House speaker marks the beginning of the end for President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s rule. Because of his administration’s trail of corruption and his own utter incompetence, he will either be ousted constitutionally through impeachment, extra-constitutionally removed or just crawl with a thousand cuts to the end of his term in June 2028.
As Romualdez’s ouster means a nearly catastrophic hit at Marcos’ power, it has immensely brightened Vice President Sara Duterte’s political star for the 2028 presidency. Nothing in the background and experience of new Speaker Faustino Dy III indicates that he could replace Romualdez as Marcos’ underboss.
Marcos and Romualdez have really been joined at the hip, just like their fathers, with Romualdez’s father and Imelda’s brother Benjamin, a Leyte governor and Philippine ambassador to the US, the dictator’s principal adviser who also took care of the clan’s biggest firms. Romualdez’s ouster means a bleeding gaping wound for Marcos.
Since July 2022, when his cousin assumed the presidency, Romualdez has been, as it were, one half of the diabolical duo that has ruled the country for three years and three months now. Although Marcos’ wife Liza has her hands in critical levers of power, she has to work in the shadows, a handicap for her ever replacing Romualdez as Marcos’ deputy.
Romualdez has been so important to Marcos that he betrayed without any hesitation the critical camp that brought him to power, consisting of Vice President Sara Duterte and former president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Why? There could only be one speaker, even if Marcos had promised that post to the former president.
https://youtu.be/eKJTvyKBYx8?si=318QiYcefjJsOrrV
The only window for Romualdez — at least by his estimation — to win the presidency was in 2028 when he would have been 65, at the height of his physical and mental powers. But the Marcos camp had already promised the presidency to Sara, without whose decision in 2022 to support the dictator’s son and instead run for the vice presidency, Marcos had no chance of winning.
Nightmare
A nightmare for the House of Marcos is that if it loses power in 2028 and if a presidency hostile to it emerges — which a President Sara most certainly will be — there would still be three years for many parties keen to implement the decision of the Hawaii District Court in 2011, which ordered the Marcos estate to pay $2.1 billion to victims of human rights violations during the Marcos dictatorship. The Marcoses refused to pay the amount and were imposed another $353 million in contempt. The court has managed to collect $19 million.
The 2011 judgment stands, which was first extended for 10 years to 2021, and then given a final extension to 2031. Enforcement of the award was discouraged when the Philippine Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that any proceeds from such a judgment was the property of the Philippine government.
https://youtu.be/ORafaAp5e0w?si=nvZ03p5QGMvR1Dks
However, if an administration waives that right, there will be a rush of private lawyers representing human rights victims to confiscate all assets of the Marcoses in the Philippines and elsewhere, including those of Imelda (who declared in her 2019 statement of assets, liabilities and net worth [SALN] a net worth of P900 million) and even of Mrs. Liza Araneta-Marcos. An easy list of Marcos Jr.’s assets that could be confiscated is in his SALN, which however he has refused to make public. A new president could order his SALN released in 2028.
Romualdez’s political power in the past three years has been because of his authority to allocate funds to House members, of the kind they could directly use as part of their legitimate expenses and of those allocated to them as chairman or members of the House’s 65 committees. The bigger source of funds he used that enabled him to get representatives to do as he wished was the pork-barrel type funds — such as the many dole out funds to the poor in the past three years — the amount for each representative he determined. Those who don’t cooperate with Romualdez are starved of funds.
Romualdez, by several representatives’ confessions, was able to get 215 congressmen to sign the impeachment complaint against Vice President Sara through such bribes.
https://youtu.be/m6Pxc51jdoc?si=bqOLAEzuaPhzTpY9
Source
Another source of funds, a bigger one which Romualdez used to control the House, was his or his deputy congressman Zaldy Co’s intervention in having “insertions” made in the budget for specific public works projects that congressmen determine, and from which they could get kickbacks or commissions from the contractors.
This has proven to be his downfall, as this practice has generated huge amounts of graft money through flood control projects that turned out to be nonexistent or terribly defective. Marcos in his 2024 State of the Nation Address boasted that under his administration, over 5,500 flood control projects had been undertaken. Marcos’ boast was, however, believed when flooding in Metro Manila and other provinces like Bulacan turned out to be worse than they were three years before.
Consequently, Congress’ investigations found that the graft made in flood control projects was so huge and so scandalous, generating billions of pesos for a contractor-couple for instance to have a collection of 40 luxury and sports cars, and for Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) middle-level officials to be high-roller gamblers in casinos. These casinos reported that the DPWH officials lost nearly a billion pesos in gambling in two years.
It was these “ghost” or deficient flood control projects that had outraged the nation so much that Marcos needed to do something, or these could consume his administration. Other than setting up a lightning rod to distract attention from him in the form of a toothless Independent Commission on Infrastructure, Marcos had to throw Romualdez under the bus.
Doorstep
The Senate investigations could lead right into Romualdez’s doorstep. His home province of Leyte has received the fourth-largest funds for flood control projects, with part of these sarcastically referred to by residents as Leyte’s “Great Wall” because of its size. Nineteen projects costing a total of P6 billion were undertaken by Sunwest Inc., owned by the family of congressman Zaldy Co, Romualdez’s closest ally, whom he had appointed chairman of the critical committee formulating the country’s annual budgets.
The imbroglio over the hugely scandalous flood control projects is “Strike 3” of Romualdez’s bungling debacles. The first was his plot to pretend that there was a citizens’ clamor to amend the Constitution — called the Pirma initiative — to create a single-chamber parliamentary system, in which Romualdez would be prime minister and Marcos president. This campaign ended in three months as Romualdez was easily exposed to have been financing the plot.
Strike 2 was Romualdez’s plot early this year to block Vice President Sara from running for president, by having her convicted through an impeachment trial. Romualdez got 215 Congress members to sign the complaint without even reading it by promising their districts allocations from government dole out schemes amounting to P150 million for each Congress member.
The bribery was exposed however by several House members themselves, among them Cebu lawmaker Duke Frasco and Navotas Rep. Toby Tiangco.
Romualdez’s bungling of the Sara impeachment was exposed when the Supreme Court ruled that the vice president could not be impeached because it was the fourth complaint that was filed at the House within a year, which is prohibited by the Constitution. In their rush to impeach Duterte, Romualdez and his operatives had three other, flimsy complaints filed by dubious groups which included a gang of communist cadres.
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
X: @bobitiglao
Website: www.rigobertotiglao.com
The post Romualdez out: The beginning of the end for Marcos first appeared on Rigoberto Tiglao.
Romualdez out: The beginning of the end for Marcos
Source: Breaking News PH
No comments: