What if the investigators and prosecutors become corrupt, too?

EVERY anti-corruption campaign begins with moral certainty. It is launched with righteous language, high approval ratings, and public exhaustion over longstanding abuse. The promise is simple: wrongdoers will finally be held to account. But history — both Philippine and global — teaches a harder truth.

The gravest danger of any aggressive anti-corruption drive is not that it fails to punish the guilty. It is that the enforcers themselves become corrupt, quietly turning prosecution power into an instrument of extortion.

Anti-corruption campaigns, by their nature, concentrate extraordinary power in the hands of investigators and prosecutors. They decide who gets investigated, which cases move forward, which stall, and which die quietly in filing cabinets. They hold reputations, freedom, and property in suspension. In such an environment, temptation does not knock — it waits patiently.

The more aggressive the campaign, the higher the leverage. And leverage is precisely what extortion feeds on.

At the heart of the problem lies an imbalance that no press release can erase. Prosecutors and investigators operate with asymmetric power over the accused. They command subpoena authority, access to bank records, the threat of asset freezes, and the ability to publicly name or quietly spare targets. Even a baseless investigation can ruin careers, drain resources, and stain reputations irreversibly.

In systems with weak oversight, this power becomes transactional. An investigation no longer merely seeks truth; it becomes an opportunity, a pressure point. The unspoken message is familiar: “This can go away.” That sentence never appears in writing. It is implied through intermediaries, “fixers,” or friendly lawyers who deliver it with plausible deniability.

Scrutiny

Anti-corruption drives attract enormous public support. That support, paradoxically, weakens scrutiny. Investigators and prosecutors are lionized as heroes, crusaders, patriots. Media outlets hesitate to question them for fear of appearing to defend graft. Critics are easily dismissed as “protectors of corruption.”

This atmosphere is ideal for abuse. Such, indeed, is the atmosphere now over flood control projects from 2023 to 2025 — over 5,500 completed, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. boasted in his third State of the Nation Address — that turned out to be non-existent, unfinished, or substandard infrastructure, which had been a major factor for the massive disastrous floods in the past two years.

There has been public outrage over the flood-control corruption, especially as contractors such as Curlee and Sarah Discaya have been disclosed to own fleets of the most expensive cars in the world, public works officials to have routinely gambled hundreds of millions of pesos in casinos, and just recently, for a lowly Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) engineer to turn over P110 million in cash “as restitution” for the money he had accumulated through flood control projects.

Ombudsman Jesus Crispin Remulla has admitted that his office — the main government agency charged to pursue corruption cases at the Sandiganbayan, the country’s special anti-corruption court — will have to hire at least 60 lawyers to do its work. An indication of the huge volume of work needed is the secondment of 50 investigators from the Philippine National Police’s Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG). I don’t think Remulla knows what he is doing here: the CIDG is a much-feared unit, but hardly has the reputation of being angels of justice.

Question

The key question here that nobody has raised: How can Remulla be sure that these new lawyers, and especially those from the PNP and Department of the Interior and Local Government, do not have the same corruption DNA that afflicts a big part of our bureaucracy, especially as these organizations have the same salary scale. Worse, for the Office of the Ombudsman, it has only 200 investigators at most, handling roughly a thousand active fact‑finding investigations, plus several hundred formal criminal and administrative cases.

To concretize my question: Isn’t the possibility high that, especially with their huge resources — billion of pesos, in fact — that corrupt contractors and public work officials will bribe investigators and prosecutors to sabotage the cases themselves, so that the Sandiganbayan would have to dismiss the cases on the all-familiar mantra of “lack of sufficient evidence”?

Indeed, check the myriad cases of corruption against the Marcoses and their cronies. Most of these were dismissed for “lack of sufficient evidence” or that “guilt could not be proven beyond reasonable grounds.” I was shocked that a few cases were dismissed because the “prosecution showed little interest in the case,” as evidenced by “their absences in hearings.”

Indeed, there have been cases of high-ranking Ombudsman officials thrown out for corruption for bribery in “fixing cases”: Rolando Zoleta, the Assistant Ombudsman for Luzon, later Appeals Bureau, Office of the Special Prosecutor, who was found guilty of grave misconduct, serious dishonesty, and conduct prejudicial to the best interest of the service for fixing cases in exchange for money; and Leonardo Nicolas Jr., head of the Intelligence Bureau, Field Investigation Office. Nicolas was involved in the Zoleta case as the operative who coordinated bribe‑for‑case‑fixing deals and was arrested in an entrapment operation. At least a hundred lower-ranking officials have been dismissed for corruption since the office was created in 1987.

Indeed, the Ombudsman’s reputation had once been so low that many law graduates from lesser-quality schools had wanted to join it. One of them was a classmate of mine at the University of the Philippines who, after passing the bar, surprisingly joined the agency. In about eight years’ time, he retired apparently very well-off.

Corruption in our judicial system is not just on the Ombudsmen, but even on the Sandiganbayan. A former ranking local government official, for instance, intimated to me: “We gave a justice once [a huge amount of bribes to acquit us], but he asked for more a year later.”

While there are many officials who joined government to serve the people, there are as many who really are the predators in the bureaucracy, hoping to get an opportunity, even just once, to make big money, for them to retire or invest in a business.

Direct

I myself had a direct experience of corruption done by people who pretended to have joined government so they could serve the people.

When I was President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s presidential chief of staff in 2002, she assigned me to organize a group we called the “Transparency Group” to undertake lifestyle checks among officials of the DPWH and Bureau of Customs as a “pilot” or experimental project.

These were not as easy as we thought, as it required massive resources to prove ill-gotten wealth that could stand up to legal requirement. Out of the 10 officials we investigated, one resigned (with his hundreds of millions of pesos in graft money intact) while another filed appeal cases until he was acquitted, and went on to become a representative in a Central Luzon district.

I found our work, though, to have had enough experience to recommend that it move out of its experimental level and expand its converge. I found, though, to my horror that one of my staff at Malacañang who was involved in the group had been meeting DPWH and Customs officials, demanding P500,000 so as not be subjected to such investigations. We fired the asshole, but were advised by our lawyers not to press charges, as there won’t be any witness to testify that he has the extortion money: our graft laws penalize both the briber and the bribee. My reputation as the White Knight in Arroyo’s Cabinet was in tatters. The idea of lifestyle checks as a means of curbing corruption faded away.

With his glib tongue, this asshole later dropped the name of former Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. chairman Ephraim Genuino to fleece South Korean investors of $5 million to invest in a project that agency had no intention to authorize. He disappeared for many years until he was appointed as head of a major revenue agency by President Marcos, who really deserves him. I hope he is appointed finance secretary soon to hasten the fall of this administration.

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What if the investigators and prosecutors become corrupt, too?
Source: Breaking News PH