From Marlen Ronquillo’s column in The Manila Times:  With the leadership of the committee changing hands, from Rodante Marcoleta to Panfilo Lacson, the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee has gained both respect and credibility.

Blue Ribbon Committee’s serious housecleaning work

By Marlen V. Ronquillo
September 17, 2025

THE intellectual and moral climbdown of the current Senate was unimaginable to earlier generations of Senate reporters. At least up to the 8th Congress, which then-Senate president Jovito Salonga, a devout Methodist who was asked by Yale University to teach at its law school but declined to devote his life to the cause of a young republic, led with brilliance and dignity.

I covered that Senate for a broadsheet and, on occasion, there was mention that of the 24 senators there, eight had degrees from Harvard, one from Yale, one from a so-called public Ivy League (University of Michigan at Ann Arbor) and one from Universidad Central de Madrid. A woman senator obtained her undergraduate degree from Wellesley, the liberal arts college that lists Hilary Rodham Clinton as an alumna.

To build from the wreckage of martial rule that smothered most of the critical institutions of polity was a task that was both challenging and time-consuming. And the senators of the 8th Congress were running against time; expectations were high and lofty. So, the senators decided to assign one senator, Victor Ziga of Albay — his mother, former senator Tecla San Andres Ziga, was the first woman to place No. 1 in the bar examinations — to be in charge of infrastructure requests from the senators’ constituents. The late Rene Saguisag jokingly called Victor Ziga, “our congressman.”

Today, it is not topics like debt repudiation, the fate of the US military bases in the country, or the imposition of a total logging ban and the rebuilding of the critical national institutions that preoccupy the current Senate. It is the depressing topic of pork barrel-tied infrastructure corruption, at a mind-boggling rapacity. While in the old days, it was the measured footsteps of greats like Jose W. Diokno and Lorenzo Tañada that roamed the Senate hallways, now we have stories of a mystery woman slyly entering Senate chambers to distribute kickbacks from corrupted flood control projects.

Or a staffer of the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee entangled in that same mesh of infrastructure corruption and was summarily removed. Yes, that same Blue Ribbon Committee that recently changed its leadership and composition — thank the heavens for that — and is currently tasked with two tough jobs: probing the flood control corruption overall and in the process confront in-house issues, which are mostly allegations about the possible involvement of some senators in the pork barrel-funded, corrupted infrastructure projects. With the leadership of the committee changing hands, from Rodante Marcoleta to Panfilo Lacson, the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee has gained both respect and credibility.

For example, who was the senator who inserted a P355 million flood control fund into the 2025 national budget, a fund not in the original 2025 National Expenditure Program? Where did that P355 million end up and what part of that P355 million fattened that culprit’s pockets? Insertion to corruption is the most familiar story, the usual route, of pork barrel-related anomalies.

Lacson, in dealing with in-house issues related to pork barrel corruption, also has the lonely job of looking deeper into allegations that a total of P142 billion in flood control funds had been inserted by some senators into the 2025 budget, with Sorsogon, the home province of former Senate president Francis Escudero and Bulacan, the home province of Sen. Joel Villanueva, as the main beneficiaries.

Lawrence Lubiano, who owns a construction company that was named by President Marcos Jr. as one of the 15 construction companies that cornered roughly P100 billion of the P500 billion flood control funds from 2022 to 2025, admitted donating P30 million to Escudero’s 2022 election campaign. Villanueva, a bible-quoting senator who got his start in politics via a party-list group supposedly established to fight corruption — Cibac, remember? — was tagged as one of the alleged beneficiaries of kickbacks from corrupted flood control projects in Bulacan. Along with Sen. Jinggoy Estrada.

Lacson, in dealing with in-house issues related to corruption, cannot ignore the report from online news outfit Rappler, which said that in 2017, Davao City-based construction company CLTG Builders, which stands for Christopher Lawrence T. Go, partnered with a firm owned by the couple Curlee and Sarah Discaya to undertake infrastructure projects in Davao City worth P800 million. Go has been saying two things. That he has nothing to do with the business of a construction company that bears his initials and that he is not involved in any form of infrastructure corruption. Which reminds us of the line from Hamlet on those “who doth protest too much.”

Right now, much of the public wrath over infrastructure-related corruption has been directed at the Discaya couple. Curlee and Sarah Discaya owned at least eight construction companies, two of which are part of the 15 flood control project monopolists named by President Marcos. The public face of flood control corruption, for one reason or another, are the Discayas, whose office building in Pasig City has been the site of anti-corruption protests.

Lacson’s committee has the unenviable task of probing deeper into these multiple in-house issues that definitely need two things: answers and possibly, a credible closure.