A private contractor that received roughly P10 billion for a Tarlac sports complex without a public bidding process is now at the center of a National Bureau of Investigation inquiry, the agency’s chief said this week.
NBI Director Melvin Matibag told reporters on Tuesday that the payment reached the company through a congressional insertion into the General Appropriations Act, and that the sum was never accounted for through liquidation. He said the firm behind the facility was Malaysian.
“And there is a private company here that was involved that paid P10 billion, and the payment was insertion, through insertion in the GAA that was not paid. We will investigate this. This is also a big case,” Matibag said, speaking Filipino, as reported by the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
The venue in question sits in New Clark City in Capas, Tarlac, and served as the principal hub for the 2019 Southeast Asian Games, which the Philippines hosted from late November through December that year. The wider sports complex, built at the National Government Administrative Center, housed the athletics stadium, aquatics center, and athletes’ accommodations for the biennial regional competition.
Matibag said the matter surfaced almost incidentally. According to the Inquirer, the NBI leadership had traveled to New Clark City in connection with a planned 70-hectare NBI Academy on the site when officials came across the sports facilities and were told that billions of pesos tied to their construction had gone unliquidated.
“We have something to look at. We need to investigate something because when we got there, it turns out that billions of pesos came in here that were unliquidated,” he told reporters.
The financing of the New Clark City facilities has drawn scrutiny before. During the 2019 budget deliberations, lawmakers including then-Senator Franklin Drilon questioned why the government committed billions to build a new complex in Tarlac rather than upgrading the existing Rizal Memorial Stadium in Manila at a fraction of the cost. The Commission on Audit that same year flagged the arrangement for handing an undue advantage to the private developer, according to reporting by Interaksyon.
Matibag noted that the funding inquiry stands apart from a separate review the bureau intends to reopen involving the SEA Games cauldron, the tall metal structure lit at the opening ceremony in Capas whose construction cost drew public criticism at the time it was built.
