A former prominent lawmaker now in hiding has released new videos accusing Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr’s family of orchestrating massive corruption, escalating a scandal that is fast becoming a test of accountability for one of Southeast Asia’s most politically influential dynasties.
Observers told This Week in Asia that although Zaldy Co’s allegations remained unverified and required rigorous fact-checking, they struck at the core of a system where budget power, patronage and family networks had long been intertwined.
Co – a former chair of the House of Representatives appropriations committee who fled the country in July and is a fugitive from the law after Marcos ordered his arrest on Friday – posted two videos from an undisclosed location levelling new allegations against the president’s son and wife while insisting he had evidence to support his claims.
In a video uploaded on Tuesday, Co alleged that he and then House Speaker Martin Romualdez had met Marcos in March at a location near the presidential palace in Manila, where the president had angrily warned them “not to meddle” in the 100 billion Philippine pesos (US$1.7 billion) worth of insertions Marcos had earlier ordered to be added to the 2025 national budget.
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“That is when I saw and felt that the president cannot now say he has nothing to do with those insertions,” Co said. “Because he himself had given the orders.”
In the same video, he claimed that the president’s eldest son, House Majority Floor Leader Ferdinand Alexander “Sandro” Marcos, had separately ordered his own budgetary insertions: 9.6 billion pesos in 2023; 20.1 billion pesos in 2025 and 21.1 billion pesos this year, or a total of 50.9 billion pesos from 2023 to 2025.
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Co also claimed that the younger Marcos told him he would have Co removed as appropriations chair and have cases filed against him after Sandro had to return 8 billion pesos to contractors who had already “advanced their payment to Sandro” because what Co had inserted into the 2025 General Appropriations Act was short of that amount.