Has Remulla broken free of Marcos?

SEN. Panfilo Lacson says the arrest of former House speaker Martin Romualdez should silence those who call President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. a weak leader. Indeed, Romualdez is the president’s first cousin and, until his political fall, the most powerful man in the House of Representatives. A president who permits a nonbailable plunder case to be filed against such a relative, Lacson argues, has shown resolve.

Lacson insults Ombudsman Jesus Crispin “Boying” Remulla Jr. It was Remulla’s office that filed the nonbailable charge for plunder and bribery.

He says it took his investigators 11 months to gather the evidence against Romualdez to be sure it would stand up in court, saying that Romualdez has tons of money to get the best lawyers and even to bribe his way out of it.

Because of Lacson’s sycophancy to Marcos, he forgets that the Ombudsman is constitutionally independent of the executive branch. Lacson may have confused the Office of the Ombudsman with the Justice secretary who is an alter ego of the president.

While it is the president who appoints the Ombudsman, he can only pick from a list of candidates — seven in the last roster — given to him by the six-member Judicial Bar Council chaired by the chief justice. More importantly, the Ombudsman has a term of seven years, without reappointment, and can be removed only through impeachment. The Ombudsman is also financially independent, since the Constitution’s Article XI, Sec.14, provides that its budget is automatically released, shielding it from budgetary strangulation by the executive.

The framers designed the post precisely so that an Ombudsman could investigate the president’s allies, relatives and even the president’s own administration without needing to get permission from the Palace, as the justice department and National Bureau of Investigation have to do.

Remulla has developed an image of incorruptibility and independence and even disclosed in a television interview that he had “held his ground” against the calls and pressures for him to allow Romualdez’s attempted departure several months back. It is a striking posture, almost pride in defiance — the claim that not even Marcos, whose cousin was at stake, could make him buckle.

Jonvic

Yes, his brother Jonvic is Marcos’ powerful interior and local government secretary, but Remulla is six and half years older, and his friends say Jonvic always defers to his kuya. A possible hold that Marcos could have on Remulla is the fact that his successor at the Justice department Fredderick Vida is his placeman, having been his longtime political vassal in Cavite. However, if Marcos ever removes Vida, Remulla will almost certainly order Jonvic to resign, which together would be a big blow to the president’s current Cabinet.

The Remullas can’t be bought: He and his brothers are multimillionaires, billionaires even, thanks to their father Crispin Sr. who was vice governor and governor of Cavite for decades in the 1970s and 1980s. The father accumulated vast tracts of land in that province and in Tagaytay City long before these areas became prime real estate when industrial parks, gated villages, golf courses and tourism establishments proliferated in that area in the 1980s.

No public proof has been established that Remulla has broken free of Marcos. One cannot pretend that their past political relationship is irrelevant. The issue is not private sentiment. It is whether Remulla’s conduct shows the institutional independence that the Constitution was meant to secure.

There are signs that it may. In April, when Romualdez sought to go to Singapore for a medical checkup, Remulla declined the request despite Romualdez’s getting clearance from the House and the obvious political sensitivity of stopping the president’s cousin from leaving. The Ombudsman then sought a hold departure order. Remulla publicly said that some people had been “burning the lines” to pressure him to grant Romualdez’s request but that he held his ground. He did not identify who called or applied pressure. Yet the remark was an unusually direct assertion that he would not buckle under it. In July, his special panel expanded the complaint and accumulated the corporate, banking and witness material that later supported a court filing.

Marcos may have made a huge mistake in appointing Remulla in October 2025. But he really didn’t have much choice. The only candidate other than Remulla in the list submitted by the JBC whom he personally knew was then-deputy executive secretary for legal affairs Anna Liza Logan. But she was widely known as his wife Liza’s longtime assistant, having been the first lawyer she recruited into the law firm she was a co-founder of. Appointing Logan would have created an uproar in the legal community, especially as she has practically zero expertise in criminal law.

Weapon

Marcos probably thought he could use Remulla, as President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III did in the case of Conchita Carpio-Morales, as a potent weapon against his enemies.

However, the heavens conspired against that. The ghost flood control scandal started to unravel in September, and set off a firestorm of public outrage. Public Works and Highways officials, contractors, and even ex-soldiers who delivered the dirty money in suitcases testified and accused Romualdez, among many other Congress representatives. The horrific floods last month intensified the fury against those complicit in stealing funds from flood control projects — and against the administration for apparently letting them off the hook. If Marcos intervened to save his cousin’s skin, he would have drowned in the tsunami of people’s outrage.

Remulla, known to be a man whose pride is matched only by his determination, went all out to file charges against those involved, which appeared to have Romualdez at the center of the conspiracy.

Having come close to death — he had a quintuple heart bypass surgery in June 2023 and had to fight leukemia also that year — Remulla probably has become a man who has made the fight against corruption the defining mission of his life’s final chapter.

On the surface, the immediate beneficiary of the arrest is Marcos, because it portrays him as willing to purge his government of corrupt officials, and even his cousin and former political lieutenant. It also allows him to claim the moral high ground in his campaign to stop Sara Duterte from running for the presidency in 2028 through an impeachment trial in the Senate and criminal charges in the regular courts. Lacson already set the messaging for this, claiming that Marcos is “proving to be a strong president.”

Quagmire

Marcos though knows that barely a year and half to the end of his term, his cousin’s quagmire could be his political doom. In a video message in April that was widely disseminated, Romualdez said he would not be “made the scapegoat while those actually accountable walked away clean; if a political play was meant to push him out and close the story, he would not go quietly or alone.”

Most observers interpreted that to be a warning to Marcos himself, as Romualdez probably concluded that he either gave the order to Remulla to prosecute him or at the very least, didn’t lift a finger to shield him from the plunder charges. Indeed, it defies logic for Romualdez to undertake the biggest plunder of public funds nearly on the scale his uncle, the dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr., without the president knowing about it, or even getting a percentage of it. Unless he has reached a secret accommodation with Marcos, I don’t think Romualdez who has lived all his life in luxury, even having several houses in Forbes Park, would be willing to live in a 48-sq m cell smaller than his maid’s room.

If Romualdez carries out his threat, and rats on Marcos, the latter may not reach the end of his term.

Remulla may have in fact begun to act as an Ombudsman should: not as the president’s prosecutor, but as the nation’s. Whether he has actually broken free of Marcos’ hold will be answered not by pronouncements or by one arrest, but by Romualdez’s conviction — and soon — and the next names, the next cases.

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Has Remulla broken free of Marcos?
Source: Breaking News PH