Romualdez: A politically dead man walking
THE most damning revelations about Speaker Martin Romualdez’s corruption did not come from anonymous leaks or financial documents hidden in some banker’s drawer. They came from the testimony of Marine Master Sgt. Orly Regala Guteza — a man trained to defend the Republic, but who found himself conscripted into the sordid duty of delivering bags of dirty cash to Romualdez’s very residences.
It’s indeed poetic justice that a delivery man, the kind whom the high-and mighty like Romualdez don’t give a glance to, will be bringing down the second most powerful man in the country. For me, Guteza is more credible than the public works officials who accused senators Jinggoy Estrada, Joel Villanueva and Nancy Binay as well as former senator Bong Revilla of receiving graft money from the ghost flood control products. An ordinary man, why would he tell lies against the powerful billionaire politician?
Dirty money usually moves through layers: bagmen, go-betweens, corporate layers. This chain provided cover, keeping politicians’ hands clean while underlings absorbed the risk. But in the Marine’s account, in December 2024, he and his comrades delivered 35 pieces of luggage containing P1.7 billion coming from Romualdez’s principal graft operator, congressman Zaldy Co, directly to the speaker’s three residences, received by his aides; some even opened the bags to check their contents in several instances.
This is hubris at its height. Romualdez made Co the chairman of the House appropriations committee, who supervised and gave the go-ahead on behalf of the speaker for the countrywide hijacking of flood-control funds by congressmen, officials of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), and even several senators. For that, Co shared in the loot.
Romualdez’s PR machine has scrambled to claim that such deliveries were impossible, as his Forbes Park residence was being renovated on the days of the alleged deliveries. Romualdez thinks Filipinos are stupid. Romualdez’s residence is not just some middle-class residence whose entrance is restricted while it is being renovated. His 42 McKinley Road residence in Forbes Park is a 4,000-sq-m mansion with not a few entrances, several for guests, two for staff. Even Romualdez has not claimed his other residence, where the dirty money was delivered, at 19 Narra Street, which was being renovated at the time.
Testimony
What bolsters Sgt. Guteza’s testimony is his report that his team also delivered a number of luggage, each containing P48 million, to what he claimed was also Romualdez’s residence, a house on Aguado St. near Malacañang Palace.
While Guteza, aged 48, and his generation most likely have never heard of the Aguado house, the place was well-known in political circles during the Marcos dictatorship as the “Little DFA (Department of Foreign Affairs).” That mansion was where Martin’s father and Imelda Marcos’ brother, Benjamin, the Philippine ambassador to the US, lived or had spent most of his working hours, just a stone’s throw from President Ferdinand E. Marcos’ office and residence. This was in order to get to Marcos immediately; he was summoned and to send the message to the foreign ambassadors and other officials that he was literally by the dictator’s side. “Little DFA,” as Benjamin “Kokoy” Romualdez was really the one who called the shots on Marcos’ foreign policy; the celebrated Carlos P. Romulo was merely for show.
Martin wanted to mimic his father and has somehow managed to occupy (or even own) the Aguado house, where he stayed often and met with congressmen and other high-ranking officials. No way Guteza would have thought of inventing the narrative that he and his team had delivered the dirty money there if that did not happen.
Guteza would have little credibility if he were just a private security guard contracted to deliver the luggage. It would have been easy for the opposition to get someone from the street and lie to put Romualdez down, and if the scheme fell through, could easily have been asked to disappear into some distant province.
But Guteza is a Marine master sergeant, an enlisted man who worked — and fought in firefights with communists and Muslim jihadists — to be promoted to the highest level for a non-commissioned officer. He has even been living in an area in Taguig where most Marines and Army soldiers live.
Incensed
A source who had talked to him said he and his comrades became so furious at the thought that their homes had been flooded, causing so much suffering to their families, because of the fact that Romualdez and Co had stolen taxpayers’ money intended to mitigate those floods — and yet were given the task of carrying these to the two corrupt officials’ homes.
It is one thing to accuse a politician of benefiting from kickbacks. It’s another to present testimony of uniformed personnel delivering the cash to his front door.
This is not the pork-barrel NGO scam where legislators could pretend ignorance while ghost foundations siphoned funds. The brazenness is staggering. It reflects these politicians’ arrogance — a belief that the speaker, a cousin to the president, is beyond accountability, and no one would dare squeal on them.
Romualdez’s case, if the Marine’s testimony holds, shows that corruption under Marcos has become so widespread that the buffers have been thrown away, the middlemen no longer needed. Romualdez and Co receive the loot directly, even delivered by a Marine, and reportedly also by Army soldiers and policemen.
Romualdez may survive procedurally. He may summon the most expensive lawyers, spin doctors and his army of social media trolls to discredit the Marine. After all, the deliveries witnessed by Guteza totaled P1.7 billion, at least that is, as these were only those he personally did, although as he was informed of other deliveries through his Viber group chat.
Marcos has been president, Romualdez the speaker of the House for over three years. The total amount easily would reach P50 billion since the scam to siphon flood control and other infrastructure funds has been going on over the three years of the Marcos administration.
PR campaign
What’s P5 billion to fund a PR campaign to belie the claims, to bribe investigators and later judges to help him go scot-free?
However, even if he manages to escape justice, Romualdez is no longer the powerful Speaker of the House that his cousin, the president, has made him. He will be a politician avoided as if he had an incurable strain of Covid-19. Now he is just the representative of Leyte’s 1st district, usually devastated by typhoons and with more than one-fourth of its half-a-million population living in abject poverty. Its sole “wealth” is that it is where his father and the Marcos strongman’s wife Imelda were born, from which the latter very early left because she was not of the relatively well-off side of the Romualdez clan.
Whatever he does now, for Filipinos, the image has already stuck: a House Speaker receiving dirty cash in his mansions, the personification of corruption in the legislature, his obese shape the very caricature of the corrupt congressman of old. In the recent corruption cases, DPWH officials turned over politicians’ share of the kickbacks in Manila envelopes, in the bigger cases, in grocery bags, delivered in dark basement parking areas, and then in noodle boxes.
Romualdez makes these look like loose change: His share of the loot was delivered to his mansions in suitcases, each one containing P48 million, carried by Marines and the police.
What makes the Marine’s story a condemnation of our government is that the Anti-Money Laundering Council, which has frozen accounts — 700 at least so far — at the whiff of suspicious transfers, has done nothing, while Romualdez likely has been furiously moving his accounts to safer havens.
The Ombudsman, mandated to prosecute unexplained wealth, remains mute. The House of Representatives, which has an ethics committee precisely to deal with members’ misconduct, has not stirred a finger — unsurprising, given that the man implicated is their own speaker.
Sen. Panfilo Lacson, who had posted on his Facebook page that he “has the president’s back” in the Senate investigation of the ghost flood-control projects, has practically dismissed Guteza’s testimony, on the preposterous ground that the lawyer who notarized it has denied she did so.
Excuse
This is such a bad excuse for shielding Romualdez. Notarization of a document doesn’t mean that the notary is claiming that its contents are true. All a notarization means is that the document is no longer a private one but a public document, which means that if it contains lies, the author is doing it in a public document, which is a felony.
And after all, whether the notarization was authentic or not, Guteza already made public his accusations when he read these before the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee, which will now be in its official proceedings, and which anyone can access through YouTube.
Now, Lacson wants a judge to decide whether the attorney really notarized Guteza’s testimony or not, obviously a ploy to exclude it as evidence of Romualdez’s corruption in the blue ribbon’s investigation.
It seems Lacson doesn’t just have Marcos’ back, but also Romualdez’s. Mahiya ka naman.
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
X: @bobitiglao
Archives: www.rigobertotiglao.com
Book orders: www.rigobertotiglao.com/shop
The post Romualdez: A politically dead man walking first appeared on Rigoberto Tiglao.
Romualdez: A politically dead man walking
Source: Breaking News PH
No comments: