Senate blue ribbon committee chair Sen. Erwin Tulfo said his panel could take up allegations of anomalous infrastructure spending in Taguig City, though only after Sen. Panfilo “Ping” Lacson formally turns over the material he has gathered.
Any submission would first undergo review to establish which accusations, which witnesses and which specific projects belong within the scope of a Senate inquiry, Tulfo said.
Lacson, for his part, indicated Friday that his own documentation continues to grow. Writing on X, he offered no specifics but suggested additional material had surfaced.
“TAGUIG GHOST INFRA PROJECTS UPDATE #3: There is too much damning (evidence). The plot thickens. The list lengthens. The case strengthens,” Lacson said.
He followed that with a line playing on a Filipino expression: “If there’s such a thing as ‘shooting into a bucket,’ there’s also ‘SHOOTING INTO THE COOKING POT.'”
Among the items Lacson has raised publicly is what he characterized as a potential double appropriation — two separate P100-million line items that, by his reading, fund a single slope protection project in the city. “One of the two must be ghost,” he said in an earlier post.
Three more slope protection allocations of P100 million each turned up in his team’s review of the 2025 General Appropriations Act, Lacson said, pushing the total value of the Taguig projects under examination to P2.385 billion from an earlier figure of P2.085 billion. He has also described at least two case studies involving suspected ghost projects in the city.
The senator’s interest in Taguig has unfolded alongside a deteriorating public relationship with Senate Minority Leader Alan Peter Cayetano, whose wife, Lani Cayetano, serves as the city’s mayor. The minority leader has rejected the ghost project claims outright, asked Lacson to present proof, and questioned why other localities are not receiving the same attention.
The cooking pot reference lands at a moment when the National Bureau of Investigation has signaled it will reopen questions surrounding the 2019 Southeast Asian Games, whose organizing body Cayetano headed. NBI Director Melvin Matibag, himself involved in public clashes with Cayetano, said the agency would look again at the cauldron built for the event — the structure that drew scrutiny as the “P50-million kaldero” after then-Senate Minority Leader Franklin Drilon raised its price tag during 2019 budget deliberations.
That review stems from documents recently acquired by the bureau and is not aimed at Cayetano personally, according to the NBI.
The bureau has separately opened its own examination of the Taguig projects flagged by Lacson.
