House leaders face raps over budget ‘blanks’
Davao del Norte Rep. Pantaleon Alvarez on Monday led the filing of graft and falsification charges in the Office of the Ombudsman against Speaker Martin Romualdez and several other lawmakers for alleged illegal tweaking of the 2025 national budget.
Alvarez, lawyers Ferdinand Topacio and Jimmy Bondoc, retired Brig. Gen. Virgilio Garcia and Citizens Crime Watch president Diego Magpantay submitted a 29-page complaint of 12 counts of falsification of legislative documents and 12 counts of violation of Republic Act No. 3019, or the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act.
Named respondents in the complaint for allegedly illegally inserting a total of P241 billion in the purported blank spaces on the bicameral conference committee report for the 2025 General Appropriations Bill (GAB) were Romualdez, House Majority Leader Manuel Jose Dalipe, former appropriations panel chair Rep. Elizaldy Co, acting committee head Rep. Stella Quimbo, and several other unnamed House staff members.
“There are other respondents we have not yet identified who we believe were part of the technical working group, acting under the instructions of the named respondents,” Topacio said.
Suspicious timing
Reacting to the complaint, Dalipe said in a statement that Alvarez, a political ally of former President Rodrigo Duterte, had “every opportunity to raise objections, question allocations, and point out any supposed infirmities during plenary discussions. Yet he did not.”
“[Alvarez’s] silence during the legislative process and his sudden emergence as a complainant only reinforces the fact that these accusations are not grounded on actual violations but are politically motivated attacks meant to discredit the House leadership,” he stressed.
He questioned the timing and nature of the complaint’s filing as it “raises suspicions that they are merely retaliatory tactics aimed at deflecting attention from the real issue: the proper and lawful use of [taxpayer] money.”
Dalipe pointed out that while both houses of Congress scrutinize the budget, “the mere fact that only the House has been impleaded in the complaint raises serious questions about the true intent behind these allegations.”
At a press briefing on Monday, Assistant Majority Leader Jude Acidre downplayed the charges, questioning the timing of the filing of the complaint, which came after 215 House members endorsed a fourth impeachment complaint against Vice President Sara Duterte.
“It’s long been discussed and they just decided to file the case now just after we transmitted the articles of impeachment to the Senate,” he said.
12 blank spaces
After the filing of the complaint, Alvarez told reporters that the charges stemmed from amounts totaling P241 billion allegedly illegally inserted in the enrolled bill of the 2025 GAB transmitted to the Palace for the President’s signature, in lieu of 12 blank spaces in the bicameral conference committee report ratified by Congress.
“You can’t say it’s a typographical error corrected by the technical working group,” the former Speaker asserted in Filipino.
He claimed the respondents specifically violated Section 3 (e) of RA 3019, pertaining to corrupt practices of public officers.
Topacio, one of the complainants, claimed that they filed 12 counts for each of the crimes because “they filled up the blanks 12 times.”
“The approved bicameral conference committee report indicated zero. It should still have been zero when it reached the President,” he alleged.
“Unless there’s a typographical error, wrong spelling or formatting, or misspelling or wrong grammar, you can’t change a zero to P90 billion or P80 billion or even P10,000,” he said.
