It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
— American humorist Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain)
We have read about massive government corruption—bridges that lead to nowhere, ghost projects and missing funds, even insertions in the national budget that lead to kickbacks and misaligned initiatives that fatten the pockets of unscrupulous officials in government.
From all these, to name a few of the enormous theft from taxpayers’ money, we assume that it is innate in our elected politicians to follow the selfish policy of just recklessly stealing cash from public funds.
But the truth is that high-level corruption in the Philippines is not reckless—it is actually heavily engineered and strategically coordinated around a single piece of legislation: Republic Act No. 7080, or the Anti-Plunder Act.
Under our law, if a public official accumulates ill-gotten wealth totaling ₱50 million or more, it is classified as plunder. Based on RA 7080, the abhorrent deed carries a penalty of life imprisonment and, crucially, it is a non-bailable offense.
If you hit that ₱50-million threshold, you will then sit in a jail cell during your trial and, consequently, if proven guilty, you will suffer more—but not enough, to some observers.
So, what if you steal less, say ₱49.9 million?
This then is classified as mere standard graft, and the culprit can post bail, sleep in their own mansion and delay the court proceeding for as long as 20 years.
This creates the terrifying macroeconomic phenomenon we term as tranche bribing.
Reality shows us that when a political syndicate wants to steal ₱500 million from a massive infrastructure budget, they do not do it in one transaction. They deliberately slice the project into dozens of smaller, separate contracts, ensuring that the kickback on each individual contract strictly remains below the ₱50-million threshold.
From here, it is highly unlikely that our anti-corruption laws can truly stop the thievery.
Essentially, the plunder threshold just became a legal blueprint, teaching politicians the exact mathematical limit of how much they can steal per transaction while remaining perfectly immune to jail time.
FOR your comments or suggestions, complaints or requests, just send a message through my email at cipcab2006@yahoo.com or text me at cellphone numbers 09171656792 or 09171592256 during office hours from Monday to Friday.
Thank you and mabuhay!
