By Beting Laygo Dolor, Editor

MANILA  –  President Ferdinand Marcos Jr’s problems with the 2025 budget law that he signed refuse to go away.

This time, it is his closest and arguably most powerful political ally, Speaker Martin Romualdez, who is being made to answer for the General Appropriations Act of 2025 that a former speaker says were full of illegal insertions.

Former speaker Pantaleon Alvarez filed a case against Romualdez and two others before the Ombudsman at the start of this week, accusing the incumbent of falsifying legislative documents.

In his complaint, Alvarez said Romualdez and his cohorts had placed P241 billion worth of insertions in the national budget.

Alvarez’s fellow complainants were lawyers Jimmy Bondoc, Raul Lambino, and Ferdinand Topacio, along with non-government organization Citizens Crime Watch.

Romualdez’s co-accused were House Majority Leader Jose ‘Mannix’ Dalipe, Ako Bicol Party-list Rep. Zaldy Co, and other unnamed individuals.

They were charged at the Quezon City Prosecutor’s Office on Monday.

(Note: All government officials accused of wrongdoing are tried by the Office of the Ombudsman instead of the regular courts.)

Romualdez said he would not comment on the accusations levied against him until he had seen the formal complaint.

Marcos signed the P6.326 trillion budget bill into law on December 30, last year, but not before vetoing P194 billion worth of line items.  

It was former president Rodrigo Duterte and Davao City Rep. Isidro Ungab who first flagged alleged discrepancies in the budget. They cited missing budget allocations for items under the Department of Agriculture and unprogrammed appropriations.

Marcos said his predecessor was “lying.”

Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin said the budget law was legal, and had no unconstitutional provisions. He also said the administration welcomed all legal challenges to the approved budget.

Alvarez and  company’s complaints centered on supposed blank entries in the bicameral conference committee report on the budget.

He said they had received copies of the bicam report via email, and it showed blank entries, but when the president signed it, it was complete. The amount involved totalled P241 billion.

Topacio said, “these amounts were illegally inserted, without authority, because it was done so after the Bicam Report was ratified, and therefore the amounts inserted were not found in the approved Bicam Report and, worse, were not ratified by Congress.”

”The correct thing to have done was to keep the blanks left as blanks, because this is what Congress ratified, but, instead, they did the exact opposite. They illegally inserted amounts worth P241 billion. This is not a correction; this is an unauthorized insertion that violated the Revised Penal Code.”

House appropriations panel acting chairperson Stella Quimbo earlier confirmed that there were indeed blank items in the bicameral report on the budget, but these had later been identified and corrected before the president signed the budget into law.