By Diego Morra
Vice President Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio has become loquacious again, questioning the seriousness of President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr.’s campaign against the plunder of funds for flood control projects (FCPs) for failing to kidnap Ako Bicol Rep. Elizaldy Co in the United States and arrest resigned Speaker Ferdinand Martin Romualdez.
In short, Sara Duterte Jr. suggests that the Marcos Jr. administration use extra-legal means to put her enemies in the slammer. Sorry for her but the International Criminal Court (ICC) has already ruled about the legality and justiciability of the arrest of her father, the unlamented ex-president Rodrigo Duterte, who had earlier dared the international tribunal to come and get him, taunting the court to try him before then angel of death beats them. Now, the Duterte patriarch is invoking all the excuses available to get him out of the detention cell at the Scheveningen Prison in The Hague, save for his morbid feat of ghosts.
Nothing has been confirmed about the yarn that the ghost of Slobodan Milosevic walks through the prison reserved for ICC detainees. But what would be in the elder Duterte’s head are the pictures of the 30,000 Filipinos murdered in the course of his bloody “war on drugs” that some lawmakers at the House of Representatives tagged as an operation to hide the bloody operation of the criminal syndicate headed by Rodrigo Duterte himself. The spirits might as well include that of a 7-year-old boy who was shot dead for theft, a brutal act that a former Duterte enforcer witnessed and made him retch.
Other Duterte pals might not have witnessed such an inhuman act as they specialize in a more profitable activity, making hay while the regime lasted. One such crony was Gen. Glenn Escandor, owner of the Royal Mandaya Hotel in Davao City located not far from the Davao City Hall. Described as very close to Rodrigo, he controls the 182-bed hotel, a favorite of contractors and businessmen who want to deal with the Dutertes. His wife hails from Davao Oriental and purportedly belongs to a royal Mandaya family (royalty is not recognized in indigenous communities), even as the traditional Mandaya settlements in Davao Oriental like in Caraga town hosted the first Spanish colonial outposts and, in due course, developed into rural commercial centers. Caraga was supposed to be the original Davao City, centuries before what we now know as Davao City became the hub of abaca plantations manned by Japanese farmers.
Escandor’s Genesis 88 Construction, Inc. bagged lucrative contracts with the Duterte administration, as previous reporting by the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) showed. Three years ago, Escandor’s Esdevco Realty Corp. was listed as the sole corporate donor of Sara Duterte in her 2022 vice presidential campaign, paying for Sara’s advertisements costing P19.9 million. This pales in comparison to the P70-million plunked in by Rodrigo’s other crony, Dennis Uy, for his presidential campaign in 2016. Surprisingly, DPWH’s Project and Contract Management Application website does not show any contracts won by Genesis88 in 2017. Another report showed Genesis88 handled a DPWH project in Davao City that started in the same year, despite the project being implemented by another company. So, that is their corporate veil, subcontracting the job or cloaking the work as belonging to a partner-firm.
The following year, Genesis88 cornered three DPWH projects in Davao City worth P289.5 million, all of them dubbed as rehabilitation projects for creeks and a main drain and priced at exactly P96.5 million each. In 2019, the DPWH website did not list any new contracts for the Escandor company. From 2020 to 2023, construction of flood-control structures and revetments dominated the Genesis88 portfolio. For this period, contract values rose steadily. It was only last year when the Escandor contracts slid to P1.2 billion. Escandor’s fortunes did not sink to the bottom of Philippine Deep under the Marcos Jr. dispensation. Today, Genesis88 is the top flood-control contractor in Davao del Sur, with the cumulative value of its FCPs rising to P2.9 billion, all of them marked “completed” between July 2022 and May 2025. If the Independent Commission on Infrastructure (ICI) were to scrutinize the FCPs in Davao City, they might find big surprises on how Genesis88 operated.
A humongous question battering the Dutertes is the accusation that they got P51-billion for FCPs and other projects from 2022 to 2025 and their knee-jerk reaction is to dismiss the allegation as “political harassment,” arguing they have all the receipts to show that, like Caesar’s wife, they are beyond reproach. During the September 9, 2025 hearing of the House infrastructure committee, DPWH Undersecretary Maria Catalina Cabral confirmed that the first district of Davao City under Rep. Paolo Duterte, received P51 billion from 2022 to 2025. Rep. Paolo Duterte denied any irregularity, claiming the FCPs were legitimate while daring his peers to show their own budgets and projects. The Duterte evidence is like a slow train coming, probably derailed and, like the character in Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” will never come. In August 2024, Sara Duterte insisted the national government did not fund a flood control master plan for Davao City that was developed during her father’s term. This plainly contradicts the Cabral disclosure and the statement of her own brother.
It turned out that just like in thousands of other FCPs managed by the DPWH, only a fraction of the allocated P51 billion was managed by the local DPWH engineering office in Davao. The majority of the funds were “centrally managed” by the national DPWH office, making them more difficult to track but easy to disburse, with both the contractors of DPWH officials using the old boy network to speed up the issuances of Special Allotment Release Orders (SAROs) and the division of the loot. As the inquiry has shown, one DPWH district engineer can get as much as 40% of the loot and three of his obedient underlings share the remainder. The loot becomes bigger when the FCPs are “attested” by DPWH officials as “completed” when they are not and when FCPs are “verified” to be “completed” when not a single grain of sand has been used for the project. Simply put, the more ghost FCPs, the bigger the payday for the conspirators.
