Senator Rodante Marcoleta must file a motion for bail before he can walk free, after the Sandiganbayan Third Division on Monday granted the arrest of the lawmaker and three co-accused in a plunder case tied to donations he allegedly failed to report during his 2025 Senate run.
Plunder carries no automatic right to bail, meaning Marcoleta and the others will remain exposed to detention unless the anti-graft court grants them provisional release. As the arrest order came down, the senator was already at the Office of the Clerk of Court of the Sandiganbayan.
Associate Justice Karl Miranda relayed the ruling following a hearing in which the court rejected Marcoleta’s bid to have the case thrown out.
The order also covers three men described by prosecutors as the senator’s campaign donors: former Anakalusugan party-list Rep. Michael Defensor and businessmen Joseph Varias Espiritu and Aristotle Baluyut Viray.
Prosecutors traced the P75 million to three transactions in early 2025 — P30 million on January 6, P25 million on January 8, and P20 million on January 9. None of it, the Ombudsman said, surfaced in Marcoleta’s Statement of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth or in his campaign finance filings.
The Ombudsman pointed to the timing of the donor’s tax payment, settled only in December 2025, as a sign the money was being hidden. That payment, prosecutors noted, came after the senator had already explained away the missing donation in his campaign expenditure statement.
Marcoleta had defended the omission months earlier. “Utang na loob na, eh. Ngayon, dahil sa hindi ko puwedeng isiwalat ang kanilang identity, kaya sinabi ko zero in contribution,” he said in November 2025. (It is a debt of gratitude, that is why I cannot divulge their identity, that is why I said zero in contribution.)
That reasoning drew a sharp rebuttal. “The moment gratitude is used to explain away P75 million in undisclosed money, it stops being ‘utang na loob’ and becomes exactly what our plunder and bribery laws were written to prevent,” the Ombudsman said.
The plunder counts are not the only charges. Marcoleta faces three counts of violating Presidential Decree 46, which bars public officials from accepting gifts or benefits connected to their duties. Defensor, Espiritu, and Viray each face a single count under the same decree.
In announcing the case on Friday, the Ombudsman framed it as unavoidable rather than deliberate. “Today, we filed a plunder case against Sen. Rodante Marcoleta before the Sandiganbayan. This was not a decision made lightly or by choice. The evidence includes three cash donations totaling P75 million, undeclared in the senator’s SALN (Statement of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth) and campaign finance reports. This leaves our office no discretion to look away,” the office said.
Defensor pushed back on social media, questioning whether a plunder charge could stand on campaign contributions alone and whether the law was being enforced without favoritism. He maintained that no public money changed hands and that nothing was traded for the donations. “No favor was requested, promised, or given in exchange for any donation,” he said, adding that he intends to fight the charge and keep speaking out on the flood control controversy.
Marcoleta, for his part, has cast the prosecution as an effort to muzzle critics of the administration as scrutiny of the flood control anomalies widens.
