The House Infra Committee ordered its members Tuesday to disclose if they had any conflict of interest in the joint panel’s investigation into alleged questionable flood control projects.
Before the inquiry began, Akbayan party-list Rep. Chel Diokno moved for House Infra Comm members to “make a full disclosure of financial, business or pecuniary interest that may be directly or indirectly affected by any investigation into the government’s past or present flood control projects.”
“I believe we need to assure the public that this investigation will not be a whitewash and that no members of the three committees conducting this investigation have a conflict of interest,” Diokno said. His motion was seconded by Representatives Leila de Lima and Edgar Erice.
“When the House of Representatives investigates anomalies in flood control projects, we must ask: is it wise, is it prudent, is it proper for this Chamber to investigate itself, when there are already reports that some members here may be involved in these very projects?” De Lima said.
“Conflict of interest here is not theoretical. It is not distant. It is real, and it will shape how this inquiry is seen or perceived. Where one is most probably the subject of the investigation, or is likely and liable to be a suspect, or has a personal interest of not being punished himself as an outcome of the investigation, he should not be part of the investigation,” she added.
“No one should be a judge in their case,” De Lima said.
House Deputy Speaker Janette Garin said she respects the views of Diokno and De Lima but warned that she was worried “that the oversight powers of Congress will be clipped in the guise of conflict of interest.” Still, with no objection from joint panel members, the House Infra Comm approved Diokno’s motion.
Earlier, tensions flared at the hearing as Representatives Janette Garin and Toby Tiangco exchanged words during interpellations on the motion to invite former Appropriations Committee chair Zaldy Co. Tiangco questioned how a congressman can be a resource person and testify under oath amid allegations of lawmakers involved in the anomaly. He then alleged that Co’s 2025 budget insertions at the bicam amounted to over P13 billion.
The House Infra Comm gave its members five working days to submit to their respective committees a written disclosure on conflict of interest with the probe, if they have any.
Meanwhile, Manila Rep. Joel Chua said the flood control scam now hogging the public limelight did not appear out of thin air but could be traced back to questionable budget insertions made during the Duterte administration. He warned that years of unchecked practices had allowed ghost and substandard projects to proliferate nationwide.
“The anomalies in the national infrastructure projects shared by the President himself and some government officials have been a hot topic in recent weeks.
The names of contractors who were repeatedly awarded flood control projects came out—projects that later proved to be ghost projects or had low-quality construction, or contractors who were undercapitalized but were awarded large projects,” said Chua, chair of the House Committee on Good Government and Public Accountability and co-chair of the Infra-Comm, during his opening statement at the inquiry.
Chua said the controversy was not born overnight but stemmed from long-standing practices of budget insertions that proliferated during the Duterte years, creating an environment where anomalies thrived unchecked. He reminded colleagues that the Commission on Audit (COA), in reports from 2017 to 2020, had flagged thousands of projects that were either delayed, defective, or never implemented at all, costing the public hundreds of billions of pesos.
“In 2018, the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) also reported the involvement of several major contractors in flood control projects that were either delayed or left unfinished,” he noted.
