Calling the Financial Action Task Force... please look into one of the biggest sources of money laundering in this country: election campaign finance.
The details of recent plunder cases filed by the Office of the Ombudsman against several big fish should give the global dirty money watchdog FATF an idea of the seriousness of this problem that has destroyed governance in our country.
Created in 1989, the Paris-based FATF works to protect the integrity of the global financial system, stopping terrorist and proliferation financing and the laundering of proceeds from a wide range of criminal activities.
The FATF had blacklisted the Philippines in June 2000 due to the lack of a legal framework against money laundering in the country. Amid the consequent global economic sanctions that hindered doing business in the Philippines including the massive remittances of overseas Filipino workers, Congress passed Republic Act (RA) 9160, the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2001. But the country remained on the blacklist until 2005, because implementation of AMLA needed to be monitored.
For reasons we can only guess, Congress also resisted including certain predicate offenses under AMLA. Counterterrorism financing was added to the list of covered unlawful activities only in 2012, with the passage of RA 10168.
Plunder, corruption, bribery and graft-related offenses were included only in February 2013 with the enactment of RA 10365.
In 2021, the country landed on the FATF gray list due to dirty money gaps related among others to casino junkets, POGOs, real estate and weak tracking of terrorist financing. The government committed to implement an 18-point plan to close those gaps, improve prosecution of financial crimes and promote beneficial ownership disclosures and corporate transparency.
The country got out of the gray list only in February last year.
* * *
FATF monitors should also check out one of the biggest and most efficient dirty money laundromats in this country: election campaign financing.
Philippine lawmakers’ resistance to reforms has been strongest on two issues: abolishing political dynasties, and regulating campaign finance.
The status quo on these two issues has created staggeringly enormous unexplained wealth for many families in our looted country.
Deeply entrenched dynasties have short-circuited the system of checks and balances against corruption at all levels of government.
And instead of regulating campaign finance, laws have been designed to make the system as opaque as possible.
We have seen this in the plunder case filed against Sen. Rodante Marcoleta, who admitted on TV that he did not declare P75 million donated to his campaign for the Senate race in 2025.
The Commission on Elections cleared him of any violation because he accepted the donations before the official campaign period started and he was not yet officially a candidate.
Under our bizarre laws, a person who has filed his certificate of candidacy becomes a candidate only when the campaign period starts a few months down the road.
But Marcoleta’s three private donors were penalized for failure to declare their donations. And the ombudsman indicted all of them in court for plunder, as the huge amounts were given to Marcoleta when he was a party-list congressman.
* * *
In a bigger case, the ombudsman is going after resigned House speaker Martin Romualdez for alleged plunder and money laundering involving mind-boggling amounts rivaling the billions alleged to have been stolen from the people by his uncle and aunt Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos during the conjugal dictatorship.
Romualdez has strenuously denied all the accusations against him, although his credibility took a hit from the drama about his health condition following his arrest.
That perceived attempt to deceive the public about his health reinforced suspicions that the charges filed by the ombudsman, backed by voluminous documents with several key details made public, are true.
The amounts mentioned, notably the P2 billion a month in alleged kickbacks from Zaldy Co, raised questions on whether the accumulation of wealth was fueled by sheer boundless greed, or because the system allowed it, or by a need to raise funds for his reported ambition to seek the presidency in 2028.
Maybe it was a combination of all three. But what’s clear is that such huge amounts of cash can’t be safely stored even in the mansions in Forbes Park that Romualdez is accused of accumulating. That kind of cash needs parking space and laundromats.
Corruption scandals in the past years have shown that these types of wealth accumulation and fund raising for election campaigns are depressingly common across the country, although rarely on the same epic scale.
Apart from pocketing public funds and receiving kickbacks from private entities, profits from criminal activities including jueteng, ransom kidnapping, armed robbery and drug trafficking have been successfully laundered not only to support politicians, but also for the criminals themselves to enter politics.
Several of them have since built political dynasties.
Congress, focused on self-preservation, has impressively resisted all proposals to dismantle political dynasties and regulate campaign finance.
Perhaps the FATF can help exert the necessary pressure for genuine reforms.