The Political Labandera Blog Group

THE FLOOD CONTROL SCAM STARTED UNDER DUTERTE

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Long before Marcos Jr.'s 2025 SONA exposed the contractors, Rolando "Nonoy" Andaya stood in Congress and warned that ₱332 billion in flood control money was being parked, padded, and stolen. Nobody went to jail. Duterte admitted the corruption was real. Then Andaya was dead.
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Before there was a Discaya. Before there was a SONA where President Marcos Jr. read out the names of contractors who cornered the flood control budget. Before flood control became the word that dominated every news cycle in 2025 and 2026, there was a Camarines Sur congressman standing in a House hearing room in December 2018, telling anyone who would listen that the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) had become, in his words, a new "gatasan" — a cash cow — for officials close to the Duterte administration.

His name was Rolando "Nonoy" Andaya Jr. He was the House Majority Leader. And the number he put on the table in early 2019 — P332 billion in questionable flood control allocations across the 2017, 2018, and 2019 budgets — was not a smaller version of today's scandal. It was, adjusted for the years involved, comparable in scale to what investigators are uncovering now.¹ The difference between Andaya's exposé and today's reckoning is not the size of the theft. It is what happened afterward.

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What Andaya Actually Found

Andaya's investigation, conducted through his position as House Majority Leader and later as chair of the House appropriations committee, began with a specific irregularity: an unauthorized insertion of P75 billion into the proposed 2019 national budget, allegedly directed by officials at the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) without proper authorization or transparency.² He pursued the trail methodically. He found that P325 million of those inserted funds had been allocated to flood control and infrastructure projects in Casiguran, Sorsogon — a municipality where Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno's own in-laws, Mayor Edwin Hamor and Vice Governor Esther Hamor, held elected office.³ Diokno, questioned directly in a congressional hearing, admitted the family relationship. He denied any impropriety in the fund allocation.

Andaya pushed further. He documented that the Department of Budget and Management had increased flood control allocations by nearly P54 billion in a single year — 2018 — even as flooding continued unabated across the country.⁴ He found a flood control project funded for a river that did not exist on a riverless plain in Sorsogon province, while Matnog, a town genuinely vulnerable to flooding, received no allocation at all.⁵ He traced P81 million in bank deposits linked to kickbacks paid to Aremar Construction and Trading Inc., a firm connected to Diokno's in-laws, as part of what he described as a "running rate" system — contractors paying 10 to 30% of contract value in bribes just to get paid for completed work, with non-paying contractors receiving nothing at all.⁶

By February 2019, Andaya had escalated the figures further: government failure to pay DPWH contractors had reached over P100 billion, a number he attributed directly to what he called "a corrupt system" that forced contractors into a bribery cycle just to be compensated for finished infrastructure.⁷ This was not corruption in the abstract. This was a documented payment mechanism, traced through bank records, named contractors, and specific projects, presented to Congress by the chair of the committee whose job was to oversee exactly this kind of spending.

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How the Palace Responded Then

Malacañang's response to Andaya's findings, delivered through then-Presidential Spokesperson Salvador Panelo, is worth reading in full because it establishes the pattern that would define the entire Duterte administration's relationship to this scandal. When Andaya raised the P100 billion in unpaid contractor obligations as evidence of systemic corruption, Panelo's response was: "Malabo yata iyon. Why would the government owe the contractors because of corruption? There seems to be no connection."⁸

This is not a rebuttal. It is a refusal to engage with the logic of the allegation. Panelo went further, suggesting that Andaya was "lawyering for these contractors" and that if contractors had complaints, they should file them directly rather than going through a congressman. He defended Diokno's integrity in absolute terms: "In 32 years of his service, there is nothing that we can throw at him."⁹ Diokno himself characterized Andaya's investigation as an attempt to "divert public attention" from the insertions — a framing the Palace endorsed without qualification, suggesting that Andaya's real motive was to deflect scrutiny from members of Congress onto the Executive branch.

What never happened, at any point in this exchange, was an independent investigation ordered by the President. No NBI probe. No Ombudsman referral initiated by Malacañang. No suspension of the officials named.

The Palace's strategy back then was defense, not inquiry — protecting Diokno's reputation rather than testing Andaya's evidence.

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The Budget That Held the Country Hostage

The consequence of this institutional standoff was not abstract. When Congress refused to simply rubber-stamp the 2019 budget given the documented insertions, the country was forced to operate under a re-enacted 2018 budget for the first several months of 2019 — new infrastructure projects stalled, construction halted, and the disbursement of salaries and resources for teachers and health workers delayed.¹⁰

The 2019 General Appropriations Act, Republic Act 11260, was not signed until April 2019 — four months into the fiscal year it was supposed to govern.

This is the part of the story that deserves the most attention, because it demonstrates the real-world cost of protecting a corrupt budget process. Ordinary government operations — services that depend on a functioning, timely budget — were disrupted for months because officials at the highest levels of the Duterte administration would not allow the questionable insertions to be removed or properly explained.

The country absorbed the cost of the delay so that the architects of the insertions could avoid full accountability. This was not gridlock caused by partisan dysfunction. It was gridlock caused, according to Andaya's documented findings, by an administration's unwillingness to surrender funds that had already been parked for favored contractors and districts.

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COA Had Been Warning Since 2017

Andaya's revelations did not emerge from nowhere. The Commission on Audit had been documenting problems with DPWH spending since at least 2017 — the first full year of the Duterte administration's "Build, Build, Build" infrastructure push.

COA's 2017 annual audit found that the DPWH had utilized only about a third of its P662.69 billion budget that year, despite a vastly improved capacity to earmark funds for various purposes — a combination that pointed toward systemic implementation failures rather than simple underspending.¹¹ The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) reported as early as 2018 on the involvement of major contractors in flood control projects that were delayed or left unfinished.

Rep. Joel Chua, addressing a House infrastructure committee hearing in 2025, made the lineage explicit: "Warnings started to come out as early as 2017. The reports from the Commission on Audit from 2017 up to 2020 stated thousands of projects that are either delayed, defective, or totally unimplemented, which amount to hundreds of billions of pesos."¹²

Chua's assessment of the 2018 scandal's scale at the time was P133 billion — and he specifically credited "the late former Majority Leader Rolando Andaya Jr." with first discovering the budget insertion mechanism that enabled it, including Andaya's account of a Bicol town mayor who told him a member of Duterte's cabinet had facilitated the "parking" of P300 million for a flood mitigation project in his municipality.¹³

Chua's conclusion, delivered 7 years after Andaya first raised the alarm, was direct: "This problem is not new, this is a problem that was inherited, accumulated, and was neglected. Now, this seems to be a wound that resurfaced again because it was not treated."

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Duterte's Own Admission

The most damning piece of evidence in this entire timeline did not come from Andaya, from COA, or from any investigative journalist. It came from Rodrigo Duterte himself.

In a pre-recorded speech that aired in February 2021, Duterte stated plainly that eradicating corruption was "impossible" and that the public should not expect him to leave behind "a pristine clean bureaucracy."¹⁴ This was not a specific admission about flood control funds — it was a general statement about the limits of his anti-corruption efforts.

But in subsequent public remarks, Duterte went further and acknowledged that corruption within the DPWH specifically was widespread and difficult to root out — an acknowledgment, made by the sitting President, that the very department Andaya had spent years investigating was, by the President's own assessment, compromised.

The admission changes the legal and moral calculus entirely. A president who is unaware of corruption in a department can claim ignorance. A president who publicly acknowledges that corruption exists in a specific department, while that department continues to disburse hundreds of billions of pesos annually, without ordering a serious investigation, without removing the officials whose names had already surfaced in a congressional inquiry, has made a choice.

The Constitution requires the President to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." An admission of known corruption without subsequent enforcement action is not faithful ex*****on. It is acknowledgment without accountability — and under the framework that governs presidential responsibility, that gap between admission and action is itself a failure of constitutional duty.

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What Happened to the People Involved

No major prosecution followed Andaya's revelations. Ombudsman Samuel Martires, who held that office during the relevant period, did not pursue a formal corruption case against Diokno despite what Andaya characterized as red flags that even the Ombudsman's office had reportedly seen.¹⁵

Diokno's career did not suffer for the controversy — he continued to serve in senior government economic posts in the years that followed.

The contractors whose names surfaced in Andaya's investigation continued to operate. The officials who had occupied key planning and programming positions within DPWH during this period — names that would resurface in the 2025-2026 investigations into the Discaya network and the broader contractor ecosystem — remained in place or advanced further within the bureaucracy.

This is the structural continuity that connects 2018 to 2025: the same department, the same categories of inserted funds, the same patterns of contractor concentration, in many cases the same personalities, operating across two presidential administrations without the kind of institutional reckoning that would have disrupted the system after Andaya first exposed it.

The "Floodgate Scandal," as it was called at the time, did not end because it was solved. It ended because the news cycle moved on, no one was charged, and the mechanism that enabled it continued operating beneath the surface for years afterward.

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What Happened to Andaya

Rolando Andaya Jr.'s personal trajectory after his investigation deserves its own honest accounting, separate from speculation his case does not support.

Andaya survived an assassination attempt in October 2018, just after filing his certificate of candidacy for the 2019 elections — during the exact period he was actively pursuing the flood control insertion investigation.¹⁶ He survived a second assassination attempt on June 1, 2021, when motorcycle-riding assailants fired on his vehicle in Pili, Camarines Sur.¹⁷ He lost his bid for Camarines Sur governor in 2019. He lost his wife, former Rep. Marissa Andaya, to cancer in 2020 — a loss he described publicly as devastating, writing that she was "the love of my life" and "my best friend." He ran for governor again in 2022, this time backing Leni Robredo's presidential campaign after initially supporting Sara Duterte, and lost that race as well.

On the morning of June 30, 2022 — the same day Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was inaugurated as the 17th President of the Philippines — Andaya was found dead in his Naga City residence with a gunshot wound to the head. His personal assistant discovered his body after hearing the shot. Police authorities investigated and reported it as an apparent su***de; the case was never publicly concluded with a definitive finding, and the Andaya family requested privacy to grieve.¹⁸ He was 53 years old.

These facts — the two prior assassination attempts, the personal losses, the political defeats, the unresolved final determination — exist together in the public record. They do not, on their own, prove a connection between Andaya's death and his earlier flood control investigation.

What they do establish, without requiring speculation, is this: the man who first put a number and a face on the DPWH flood control scandal, who challenged a sitting cabinet secretary to explain a P75 billion insertion, who traced kickback payments to a contractor linked to that secretary's family, never saw a single major prosecution result from his work, and died before any of the officials he had named faced the reckoning that is now, years later, finally underway.

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Why This History Matters Now

The flood control scandal that dominates Philippine politics in 2025 and 2026 — the Discaya network, the P545 billion national flood mitigation budget, the contractors who cornered over P100 billion in contracts, the witnesses, the Senate hearings, the impeachment trial — did not begin with President Marcos's administration.

It began, by the documented record, in 2016 and 2017, when flood control spending expanded dramatically under "Build, Build, Build," when COA first flagged DPWH's bureaucratic bottlenecks, and when the budget insertion mechanism that Andaya exposed in 2018 first took root.

This history does not excuse or diminish the urgency of the current investigations. It contextualizes them. The contractors who became "flood control giants" did not emerge in a vacuum during this current Marcos Jr. administration — many built their position during the Duterte years, when the same kind of insertions, parking, and kickback structures that Andaya documented were already operational and already protected by an administration that chose institutional silence over institutional accountability.

President Marcos Jr.'s 2025 SONA, which named contractors and triggered the current wave of investigations, was not the beginning of this story.

It was the moment the institutional silence finally broke — 7 years after a congressman from Camarines Sur first stood in a hearing room and told the country exactly how the scheme worked, exactly who benefited, and exactly how much it was costing the Filipino people in delayed budgets, stalled infrastructure, and floods that kept coming regardless of how much money was supposedly spent to stop them.

The trail does not begin with the current scandal. It leads back through it, to 2018, to a whistleblower who is no longer here to see whether the reckoning he tried to start in December of that year finally arrives.


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Sources & References
¹ Andaya's P332 billion flood control anomaly disclosure, encompassing allocations from the 2017-2019 budgets. Facebook: "Paper Trail," June 14, 2026. https://www.facebook.com/share/1E7R9jgUT5/
² PNA: "Andaya wants to ask DBM chief on budget 'insertion' issue," December 20, 2018. https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1057179 — P75 billion insertion into 2019 National Expenditure Program.
³ Ibid. P325 million in Casiguran, Sorsogon flood control allocations linked to DBM Secretary Diokno's in-laws, Mayor Edwin Hamor and Vice Governor Esther Hamor.
⁴ Ibid. P54 billion increase in flood control allocations in 2018.
⁵ Inquirer: "Ghost flood projects not new, COA gave warnings as early as 2017," September 2, 2025. https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/2103734/ghost-flood-projects-not-new-coa-gave-warnings-as-early-as-2017 — Andaya on riverless flood control project in Prieto Diaz, Sorsogon; Matnog's lack of allocation despite flood vulnerability.
⁶ Inquirer: "Gov't failed to pay DPWH contractors P100B–Andaya," February 16, 2019. https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1086436/govt-failed-to-pay-dpwh-contractors-p100b-andaya — P81 million in bank deposits linked to Aremar Construction and Trading Inc.; 10-30% kickback "running rate" system.
⁷ Ibid. P100 billion in unpaid DPWH contractor obligations attributed to systemic corruption.
⁸ PhilStar: "Palace defends DBM amid corruption allegations," February 19, 2019. https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2019/02/19/1894903/palace-defends-dbm-amid-corruption-allegations — Panelo: "Malabo yata iyon... There seems to be no connection."
⁹ Ibid. Panelo: "In 32 years of his service, there is nothing that we can throw at him."
¹⁰ Republic Act 11260 (2019 General Appropriations Act) signed April 2019, four months into the fiscal year; reenacted 2018 budget governed Q1 2019 operations.
¹¹ Inquirer, September 2, 2025 (see footnote 5). COA 2017 annual audit: only one-third of DPWH's P662.69 billion budget utilized.
¹² Rep. Joel Chua, House infrastructure committee hearing: "Warnings started to come out as early as 2017... this is a problem that was inherited, accumulated, and was neglected." Inquirer, September 2, 2025 (see footnote 5).
¹³ Ibid. Chua crediting Andaya's December 2018 revelation of P133 billion flood control scheme; Bicol mayor's account of P300 million "parking" facilitated by Duterte cabinet member.
¹⁴ Inquirer: "Duterte admits eradicating corruption 'impossible,'" February 25, 2021. https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1399856/duterte-admits-eradicating-corruption-impossible — Duterte: "Don't expect me to entirely clean as a pristine clean bureaucracy. That is impossible and cannot really be achievable."
¹⁵ Andaya's claims regarding Ombudsman Samuel Martires's awareness of red flags; no formal corruption case pursued against Diokno during this period.
¹⁶ Inquirer: "Ex-CamSur Rep. Nonoy Andaya dies," July 1, 2022. https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1620030/ex-camsur-rep-nonoy-andaya-dies — October 2018 assassination attempt following candidacy filing.
¹⁷ Ibid. June 1, 2021 assassination attempt in Barangay Palestina, Pili, Camarines Sur.
¹⁸ Ibid. Andaya found dead June 30, 2022, gunshot wound to the head; police investigation reported as apparent su***de, not definitively concluded; family requested privacy.