Ombudsman: How the flood-control money reached Romualdez

STRIP away the shell companies and the offshore trusts, and the Ombudsman’s 113-page resolution in OMB-C-C-APR-26-0044 describes something almost artisanal: men carrying suitcases of cash across Metro Manila, three to five times a week, for three years.

The resolution builds its case for plunder against former House speaker Martin Romualdez on two separate but connected systems — one institutional, the other purely mechanical.

The first is how a legislator and a party-list representative captured the national budget itself. The second is how the money that budget generated was physically moved, in suitcases, paper bags and envelopes, into Romualdez’s hands. Both come chiefly from the sworn account of Roberto Bernardo, the Department of Public Works and Highways’ (DPWH) former undersecretary for operations, corroborated by former lawmaker Elizaldy “Zaldy” Co, and eight of Co’s former security aides.

Bernardo’s affidavit walks investigators through three stages. At budget preparation, the DPWH identifies candidate projects for its proposal; legislators and executive officials — “proponents,” in the resolution’s term — use their influence to get specific projects included in the National Expenditure Program (NEP). The DPWH’s proposal goes to a regional development committee for review, is revised, then folded by the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) into the NEP that the president submits to Congress.

At budget legislation, the House Committee on Appropriations, working with the DPWH secretary and undersecretary for planning, shapes the House’s version of the General Appropriations Act (GAA). Even projects that miss the GAA have a second route: proponents lean on the DBM to approve a special budget request and release a special allotment release order (SARO) for “unprogrammed funds.”

Somewhere along that chain — upon NEP approval, GAA enactment, or SARO release — proponents collect “commitments” from contractors who want the projects: 10 to 25 percent of project cost, sometimes more, depending on who is involved. Dismissed DPWH district engineer Henry Alcantara told the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee in September 2025 that the range on flood-control projects ran from 15 to 25 percent. At budget execution, the DPWH’s bids and awards committee steers contracts to contractors who paid; those who refused were disqualified, pre-terminated, paid late, hit with Commission on Audit disallowances, suspended or blacklisted. DPWH and DBM officials who wouldn’t play along faced their own retaliation — blocked promotions, punishing assignments, disciplinary cases.

Machine

Romualdez’s leverage over this machine, the resolution argues, was structural rather than incidental. As Speaker of the House from July 2022 to September 2025, he controlled the House’s resources, supervised every committee, and could appoint, discipline or reassign personnel. He personally chose Co to chair the Committee on Appropriations and sat on it himself as an ex-officio member.

As one illustration of that reach, the resolution cites Romualdez’s own admission that he enlisted Co and the bicameral conference committee to push through an increase in the military’s daily subsistence allowance — evidence, investigators argue, that he could move budget line items well outside his own chamber.

Beneath that structure, the resolution describes two channels feeding money upward. The smaller and more granular ran through Alcantara, the Bulacan district engineer. In the second quarter of 2023, Alcantara told Bernardo that Co was requiring a 25-percent commitment on certain DPWH projects, two percentage points of which — the “balato” — was set aside for Bernardo and Alcantara themselves. Bernardo says he personally collected roughly P122 million this way between 2023 and 2025, a relatively modest sum next to what follows.

The larger channel was Co’s own collection system, which he says was set up almost as soon as he took the Appropriations Committee chairmanship in 2022: a standing monthly quota of about P2 billion tied to DPWH infrastructure projects. Those collections were delivered regularly to a Romualdez property on McKinley Road in Forbes Park, Makati. In 2024, on Romualdez’s instructions, deliveries shifted to a newly acquired mansion at 30 Tamarind Road, South Forbes Park — a property Co describes, in the resolution’s own phrase, as the designated “bagsakan at imbakan ng pera” (drop-off and storage point for money) for proceeds from SOPs, collections and project-linked cash.

P1 billion

In December 2024, Co says he personally delivered roughly P1 billion there in a single run. Add it up across 2022 to 2025, and the resolution puts the total delivered to Romualdez at approximately P55 billion to P56 billion — of which only P7.44 billion has so far been formally charged as plunder, the rest presumably awaiting further tracing.

What makes this resolution unusual is the extraordinary detail it provides about how the money was delivered. Eight of Co’s former security personnel — Christopher Esquivel, Gil Navidad Jr., Johnny Buduan, Rodante Orbillo, Benny Bulontate, Rosebert Waupan, Belnard Tube and George Villalon Jr. — gave individual sworn statements, or “Sinumpaang Salaysay,” describing specific delivery dates, drop points and rough cash values, running from a September 2022 handoff at a Pasig residence through further drops in 2025.

Two of Co’s executive assistants, John Paul Estrada and Mark Tecsay, coordinated the actual runs, with the security aides providing transport and muscle. On arrival, vehicles were waved through and the suitcases were received by Joselyn Serenio, Romualdez’s personal aide — who has also been named as a co-respondent for plunder.

The witnesses even supplied a rough currency of container sizes: a small suitcase held roughly P15 million to P25 million; a medium one, P30 million to P40 million; a large one, P50 million to P70 million. A paper bag carried P5 million to P10 million, an expandable envelope about P2 million. Orbillo, Bulontate, Tube and Villalon separately estimated that deliveries came three to five times a week. One especially large operation, in December 2023, moved an estimated P1.1 billion to the McKinley Road property using roughly 50 suitcases and boxes in a single run — among the biggest single deliveries described anywhere in the record.

Testimony

The resolution ties the delivery points to Romualdez through paper as well as testimony. No. 42 McKinley Road is registered outright to the former speaker and his wife, Tingog party-list Rep. Yedda Marie Romualdez, per its transfer certificate of title, tax declarations and electrical permits — no corporate intermediary required.

The Aguado Street property, across from Malacañang, is corroborated by an older, seemingly unrelated source: a November 2022 newspaper column by Romualdez’s cousin, ambassador to the US Jose Romualdez, which mentioned Vice President Sara Duterte and then-US vice president Kamala Harris meeting “at the Aguado residence of Speaker Martin Romualdez.”

The other three sites — 30 Tamarind Road, 14 Narra Avenue and a townhouse unit at the Manila Polo Club — are, on paper, owned by corporations with no visible Romualdez connection. That is the subject of the resolution’s separate money-laundering discussion, covered in the second part of this series: Golden Pheasant Holdings bought the Tamarind Road mansion; Brightnews Corp. holds the Narra Avenue property; both trace, through paid-up capital far too small for the purchases involved, to lawyer Jose Raulito Paras, Romualdez’s Upsilon Sigma Phi fraternity brother. The resolution treats the corporate ownership as a formality and names Romualdez as beneficial owner of all three.

None of this is adjudicated fact — yet. It is the Ombudsman’s Office special panel of investigators’ reading of affidavits from Bernardo, Co and Co’s former aides — witnesses whose own conduct is, in several cases, itself under investigation, and whose accounts the resolution’s authors nonetheless found consistent enough to allege probable cause.

Romualdez has denied the allegations and, through counsel, said he is prepared to answer them in court. What the resolution offers, pending trial, is the most detailed public account yet of how a kickback scheme is supposed to have moved from a line in the national budget to suitcases to Forbes Park mansions.

Until the Sandiganbayan issues its decision on the case though, Romualdez and his alleged accomplices will stay in the Bureau of Jail Management and Prisons Payatas facility. In the case of his aunt Imelda, it took the Sandiganbayan 27 years to convict her, and the Supreme Court another eight years to acquit her.

On Friday: From suitcases to dollars and properties

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Ombudsman: How the flood-control money reached Romualdez
Source: Breaking News PH