OPINION: The Remulla investigations could be a turning point | Sept. 11, 2026

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2:04learn more at WAMO.com. The remola investigations could be a turning point. The arrest of former House Speaker Martin Romwaldes and the filing of a plunder case against him, led by Ambood's man Crispin-Boying Riemola, Jr. could become a watershed moment in our nation's history, a decisive break with our culture of impunity. The Ambood's man has made accusations. Romwaldes is entitled to the presumption of innocence and to test every allegation in court. The Sandigan-Beyons warrant reflects a finding of probable cause, not a final judgment. But just a year ago, Romwaldes was considered the second most politically powerful man in the land. He was not only Speaker of the House, but also President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.'s first cousin and principal political lieutenant. Many claimed he was Marcos Hatchett-Man, undertaking such projects as revising the Constitution to enable the President to remain in power after 2028 and pushing the impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte. Representatives Joel Chua, Jerville Luistro, Leyla Dilema, Bienvenido Abante,

3:04Ace Barbers and Palo Ortega, the public faces of the prosecution, are political pigmies compared with the forces arrayed behind Vice President Sara Duterte. Only somebody with Romwaldes' wealth and power could have mounted such an undertaking. Romwaldes is arrest and jailing is therefore good news for Sara. The congressman who pursued the impeachment as well as the expensive private prosecutors they hired, my sources claim, will be losing the alleged Romwaldes financial support, which had made the project possible. Since we became a nation, corruption has operated not simply as the private theft of dishonest officials but as a political operating system. Money from public works, procurement and discretionary budget sustains contractors, local machines, elections and the officials who protect them. When the system works, those at the center are rarely touched. When scandal erupts, the usual response is to sacrifice lower officials or a few contractors while leaving the machinery intact. Even in the case of former President Joseph Astrata, who was convicted of plunder and jailed, we backpedaled. He was pardoned,

4:04released and later elected Manila Mayor, his two sons became senators, largely on the strength of the Astrata name and his de facto proxies. We have lagged behind our Asian neighbors not only in economic performance but in purging our nation of corruption. Indonesia's Setya Novanto, also a speaker of the House and Chairman of the Powerful Golkar Party, was sentenced to 15 years for corruption in 2018. Malaysia's former Prime Minister Najib Razak began serving a corruption sentence in 2022. Thailand's Thaksin Shinowatra was convicted in a corruption case in 2008. In China, former security chief Joe Young Kang, once a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2015. That is why the indictment and arrest of a former House speaker who is the president's cousin and once his most important ally in the House could be a turning point. Extraordinary. It would be an extraordinary irony if the very presidency that many Filipinos now judge harshly, a period marked by incompetence, disastrous flooding, public disgust and allegations of corruption on an unprecedented scale, were to change the course of our

5:06nation's history toward the light. The historical judgment would then be not that of a reforming administration, but of one whose mammoth failures made reform unavoidable. History has produced such reversals. Nixon's Watergate scandal, one of the great discraces of the American presidency, helped produce campaign finance reforms, financial disclosure requirements and the office of government ethics. Hong Kong's police corruption crisis, crystallized by senior police officer Peter Godberg's escape while under investigation, led in 1974 to the Independent Commission against Corruption, ICAC. In neither case did scandal magically purify the country. Public anger was converted into institutions. The comparisons with Singapore, Hong Kong and China must be used carefully, however. None became prosperous because it put one prominent politician in handcuffs. Their experience shows that an anti-corruption drive matters economically only when it changes the expected rules of public life. Investors, businesses and ordinary citizens must come to believe that permits, contracts, courts and public money will no longer be controlled by personal access. That belief

6:10comes from institutions, credible enforcement and cases reaching people once considered untouchable. Hong Kong is perhaps the clearest illustration. In the early 1970s corruption and its police force was so entrenched that Godberg was able to flee while under investigation. The outrage helped produce the ICAC, deliberately placed outside the police. Hong Kong's industrial and commercial rise had begun earlier, but the ICAC helped provide a cleaner, more predictable official environment in which a trading and financial center could deepen. Singapore's corrupt practices investigation bureau was created in 1952, and the People's Action Party government after taking office in 1959 strengthened anti-corruption law and enforcement as part of a wider reconstruction of the state. The lesson is that impunity can be broken, but selective prosecution and bureaucratic fear are no substitutes for transparent institutions. President. There is also a useful American precedent. The United States Senate's Pacora investigation, named after the prosecutor who led the investigations, in 1933 exposed conflicts of interest, deceptive securities practices and reckless conduct by major

7:14Wall Street institutions before the Great Depression. Congress followed with the Securities Act of 1933 and Securities Exchange Act of 1934, creating the Securities and Exchange Commission. An investigation became rules, disclosure and an institution intended to outlast the scandal. That is the standard by which the Romwald S.K. should be measured. There are three tests. The first is whether investigators follow the money. If the allegation concerns a network of kickbacks, the inquiry cannot stop with the politician alleged to ever see them. It must identify contractors, intermediaries, corporations, bank transactions and officials who made the scheme possible, determine how projects were selected and cost it, identify who benefited from winning companies, and establish whether the public works were actually delivered. The Estrada episode failed this test. He alone was convicted, while those allegedly involved in the surrounding transactions, intermediaries, businessmen, bankers and others who facilitated the movement or concealment of money, largely escaped serious accountability.

8:14The second test is whether the case produces safeguards rather than headlines. Procurement data should be promptly public and searchable, with beneficial ownership of contractors disclosed. Vid documents, project locations, progress reports and final inspections should be opened as scrutiny. Budget amendments must leave a trail showing who requested them and why. Cases involving powerful defendants must move fast enough that delay does not become another form of acquittal. The Priority Development Assistance Fund, PDAF, pork barrel scandal during the Aquino 3 administration plainly failed this test. This produced no permanent cleansing of the political machinery. Three senators accused in connection with PTAF were eventually acquitted, only six congressmen were convicted, while Janet Limnopoulos, a small businesswoman, became the enduring symbol of the scandal, sentenced practically to a lifetime imprisonment. The PTAF scam involved fictitious non-governmental organizations and at most P10 billion install and government funds, the present flood control allegations are vastly larger, up to P56 billion, by the Amboodsman's reckoning. Worse, the PTAF scam stole funds from small-time projects such as

9:19livelihood seminars or construction of basketball courts. The current scandal resulted in hundreds of thousands of Filipinos homes flooded. Equality? The third test is equality. If Rom walled us alone falls while other actors are protected, the case will be understood as a controlled sacrifice within a ruling coalition. If evidence is pursued against whoever is responsible, regardless of surname, office or present political usefulness, it can begin to establish a different norm. The state is not a private business and public money is not the prize awarded to the winner of an election. That is why this may be a historic moment. But we have had false starts before. Ezza, I was supposed not only to end the Marcos dictatorship but to usher in genuine democracy and corruption. Decades later, corruption has spread beyond small circles of cronies to the House of Representatives and the Public Works Department and who knows what other government agencies. The Estrada episode and the PTAF scandal have become little more than memories. There are not a few who think that Rom walled us as a rest is some part of an elaborate moral moral that the case against him, as what happened in the graft cases against his anemeldra, will be dismissed and much,

10:24much sooner than the three decades it took the former dictators widow to do so. But the big difference is that the plunder charge requires Rom walled us to be in jail, in a cell smaller than one of his maids room, until he has proven innocent, emeldra never spent a day or an hour in jail. I can dream, can't I? I am hoping that it will be our history's bittersweet irony that from the rod, something new takes root. I do hope this will not be known in history as the Rom walled s case but mirroring the U.S. episode in the 1930s. The remola investigations, after the embudsmann who appears to be determined in prosecuting the formally second most powerful politician in the country. Facebook, Rigoberto Tiglao. X, Add Bobbitt Tiglao. website www.rigobertotiglao.com. You're either all in on this model or maybe you're building with another name. Are there speed or is it security? Or your AWS AI? Don't pick a side. Pick them all. AWS AI is how. This podcast is brought to you by Thompson Reuters. The best don't just do their work.

11:30They change what's possible. Cases one, audits completed, jobs saved. Behind every one of those moments is a professional who needed to get it right and did. Thompson Reuters builds the technology that sharpens insights, speeds up decision making and powers the outcomes that matter. So when professionals act, the impact is felt by everyone. Be a change maker. Visit TR.com forward slash change makers. Car crashes injure over a million of us every year because we're human. For over a decade, we must have been building a driver that's safer. Statistically, 10 times safer in the cities we serve. Not because humans aren't enough, but because they're everything. Based on over a 94% reduction in serious injury or worse crash rates, learn more at Waymo.com.