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MANILA: Thousands of protesters took to the streets in the Philippine capital on Sunday to express their outrage over a corruption scandal involving lawmakers, officials and businesspeople who allegedly pocketed huge kickbacks from flood-control projects in the poverty-stricken and storm-prone Southeast Asian country.
Police forces and troops were put on alert to prevent any outbreak of violence. Thousands of police officers were deployed to secure separate protests in a historic Manila park and near a democracy monument along the main EDSA highway, also in the capital region, where organizers hoped to draw one of the largest turnouts of anti-corruption protesters in the country in recent years.
The United States and Australian embassies issued travel adviseries asking their citizens to stay away from the protests as a safety precaution.
A group of protesters waved Philippine flags and displayed a banner that read: “No more, too much, jail them,” as they marched in the Manila protest and demanded the immediate prosecution of all those involved in the scandal.
“I feel bad that we wallow in poverty and we lose our homes, our lives and our future while they rake in a big fortune from our taxes that pay for their luxury cars, foreign trips and bigger corporate transactions,” student activist Althea Trinidad told The Associated Press in Manila, where she joined a noisy crowd that police estimated at around 8,000 people by midday. “We want to shift to a system where people will no longer be abused.”
Trinidad lives in Bulacan, a flood-prone province north of Manila where officials said the most flood-control projects were being investigated either as substandard or nonexistent.
“Our purpose is not to destabilize but to strengthen our democracy,” Cardinal Pablo Virgilio David, the head of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, said in a statement. He called on the public to demonstrate peacefully and demand accountability.
Organizers said protesters would focus on denouncing corrupt public works officials, legislators and owners of construction companies, along with a system that allows large-scale corruption, but they would not call on President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to step down.
Marcos first highlighted the flood-control corruption scandal in July in his annual state of the nation speech.
He later established an independent commission to investigate what he said were anomalies in many of the 9,855 flood-control projects worth more than 545 billion pesos ($9.5 billion) that were supposed to have been undertaken since he took office in mid-2022. He called the scale of corruption “horrible” and has accepted his public works secretary’s resignation.
Public outrage erupted when a wealthy couple who ran several construction companies that won lucrative flood-control project contracts showed dozens of European and American luxury cars and SUVs they owned during media interviews. The fleet included a British luxury car costing 42 million pesos ($737,000) that they said they bought because it came with a free umbrella.
Under intense public criticism, the couple, Sarah and Pacifico Discaya, later identified during a televised Senate inquiry at least 17 House of Representatives legislators and public works officials who allegedly forced them to pay huge kickbacks so they could secure flood-control projects in an explosive testimony.
Two prominent senators were later implicated in the scandal by a former government engineer in a separate House inquiry. All those named denied wrongdoing but they face multiple investigations.
Senate President Francis Escudero and House Speaker Martin Romualdez separately stepped down in a widening fallout from the scandal, as both chambers of Congress face intensifying criticism after several legislators were implicated in the corruption allegations.
At least three government engineers were dismissed and 15 others were being investigated prior to dismissal. All face criminal complaints and their bank accounts, houses, cars and other assets will be frozen, Public Works Secretary Vince Dizon said.

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump publicly urged his Justice Department on Saturday to take action against his enemies, the latest in a series of moves that critics say have shattered the agency’s traditional independence.
In a social media post addressing “Pam” — apparently Attorney General Pam Bondi — Trump fumed over the lack of legal action against California Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James, both Democrats.
Schiff and James are among a handful of people who have been accused by a close Trump ally, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte, of falsifying documents on mortgage applications.
“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” Trump said.
On Friday, Trump fired the federal prosecutor who was overseeing the probe into James, after the attorney reportedly insisted there was insufficient evidence to charge her with mortgage fraud.
Erik Siebert, US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, told staff of his resignation via an email on Friday, the New York Times and other US media outlets reported.
“I fired him, and there is a GREAT CASE, and many lawyers, and legal pundits, say so,” Trump said Saturday, apparently referencing the probe into James.
Schiff and James have separately clashed with Trump in prior years, leading investigations that the Republican president alleges were political witch hunts.
During Trump’s first term in the White House, Schiff, then a member of the US House, led the prosecution at the president’s first impeachment trial, which was based on allegations he pressured Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 election.
Trump was eventually acquitted by the Senate then, and again in 2021 when he was impeached a second time, this time for “incitement of insurrection” connected to the January 6, 2021 invasion of Congress by his supporters.
After Trump left the White House, James brought a major civil fraud case against him, alleging he and his company had unlawfully inflated his wealth and manipulated the value of properties to obtain favorable bank loans or insurance terms.
A state judge ordered Trump to pay $464 million in that suit, but a higher court later removed the financial penalty while upholding the underlying judgment.
“They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” Trump wrote Saturday.
Trump has also been convicted of 34 felonies related to hush money payments to a porn star.
Earlier this month, a US appeals court upheld a jury’s $83.3 million penalty against Trump for defaming author E. Jean Carroll, whom he was found to have sexually assaulted.
Investigations into Trump over alleged mishandling of classified material and attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election were abandoned when he was re-elected last year.
Trump said he would be nominating White House aide Lindsey Halligan, who has been leading a review of the Smithsonian Institution’s content for “divisive or partisan narratives,” to fill Siebert’s position.