Cement poured nowhere, steel laid on nothing — that was what Agriculture Secretary Francisco Tiu Laurel Jr. found when he personally visited a string of farm-to-market road project sites in Davao Occidental that were supposed to have been built with P94 million in public funds.
On Thursday, Laurel brought those findings to the Office of the Ombudsman, filing eight cases against six Department of Public Works and Highways officials — among them district and project engineers — and eight private contractors allegedly responsible for the non-existent infrastructure.
The projects were funded under the 2021 national budget and were meant to connect farming communities to markets through cemented roads. Laurel said his own site visits, conducted late last year, revealed no such construction had taken place.
“I went to these sites late last year, there’s really nothing — zero,” he told reporters after the complaint was filed. “There are dirt roads, but there is no cement, no steel, nothing.”
The specific sites named in the complaints were not immediately disclosed to the media. Laurel said the cases target both the government engineers who oversaw the projects and the private contractors who were engaged to carry them out.
