By Ade S. Fajardo

Flood control is the scandal that felled a Senate president.

In May 2024, Chiz Escudero replaced Migz Zubiri as Senate head, one year before the national elections that saw administration candidates getting shellacked at the polls.

Among his jubilant colleagues were Senators Joel Villanueva and Jinggoy Estrada, who now face the prospect of standing trial for criminal charges at the Sandiganbayan.

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Escudero was reelected Senate president as soon as Congress resumed in July this year.

We all know what happened. Under his leadership, the Senate buried the impeachment complaint against Vice President Sara Duterte.

That jubilation proved to be short lived. In a couple of months, Escudero was ousted after the flood control scandal was detonated by no less than the President.

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The optics did not help him.

Piles of cash were photographed by engineers of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) as they documented “commitments” to the legislators who had been responsible in causing public funds to be funneled to choice flood control projects in Bulacan.

Among the first casualties of the public outcry that ensued are Villanueva and Estrada, who were unmasked by the engineers themselves as having received kickbacks from the downloaded public funds.

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This angered the public to such a simmering degree that Senator Ping Lacson was constrained to take back the chairmanship of the Senate blue ribbon committee after relinquishing it due to the anxiety of possibly implicating his sullied colleagues.

Escudero was himself named as a “proponent,” i.e., a legislator who allocated public funds in the expectation of getting something in return.

Former DPWH Undersecretary Robert Bernardo accused Escudero and his alleged friend and bagman Maynard Ngu of receiving 20 percent in kickbacks from infrastructure projects in Marinduque and Valenzuela.

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Zaldy Co stole the thunder on the same day that Bernardo testified in the Senate blue ribbon committee further implicating Ngu and Escudero.

This was the day that Co started with his video series that pointed to members of the First Family as beneficiaries of infrastructure kickbacks.

While this was a successful deflection in the meantime, Co subsequently referred to a letter he wrote to the president detailing how his fellow Bicolano, as Senate president, had pressured him to relent to almost P150 billion in insertions favoring the DPWH in the 2025 national budget.

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House Deputy Speaker Ronaldo Puno thus blames the two Bicolanos — Escudero and Co — for the 2025 budget controversy which, in its final form, included more insertions for DPWH, to the prejudice of other important departments like the Department of Education.

“It ended up Zaldy Co and Senate President Escudero were the ones who actually penciled in whatever needed to be penciled in at the end … it was the two that actually finalized those things,” Puno said in an interview.

Today is roughly two weeks to the deadline set by Ombudsman Crispin Remulla on the filing of criminal cases against big fish in the flood control scandal.

Will Bicol yield the biggest fish?/WDJ