Marcos and Duterte received millions in contributions from contractors. Can—and will—they be held to account?
(Guinevere Latoza of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism looked into the campaign expenditures of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Vice President Sara Duterte and found that the former UniTeam tandem received millions of pesos in campaign contributions from public works contractors in the 2022 elections)
President Marcos and Vice President Sara Duterte received tens of millions of pesos in campaign contributions from public works contractors despite a provision in the Omnibus Election Code that bans those seeking public office from accepting contributions from entities that do business with the government.
In the last three years, these contractor-contributors saw a significant rise in the value of public-works contracts awarded to them, significantly much more than they had in the past, according to publicly available government records.
Data from the statement of campaign contributions submitted by candidates to the Commission on Elections show that tycoon Rodulfo D. Hilot Jr., owner of Zamboanga del Sur-based Rudhil Construction & Enterprises Inc., was one of the president’s largest contributors during the 2022 election cycle. He gave P20 million to elect Marcos Jr.
Another contractor, Jonathan M. Quirante, owner of Cebu-based Quirante Construction Corporation, donated just P1 million.
After the election, both contractors benefited from a steep increase in the value of government contracts awarded to their firms. The most dramatic example is that of Quirante Construction, whose total solo and joint contracts leaped to P3 billion in 2023—a billion-peso increase in just one year after the election.
Sara Duterte, meanwhile, was the beneficiary of generous contributions from a real-estate firm owned by construction magnate Glenn Escandor, whose other company, Genesis88 Construction Inc., bagged DPWH contracts that grew by leaps and bounds during the Rodrigo Duterte administration.
In 2022, Escandor’s Esdevco Realty Corporation was listed as the sole corporate donor of Sara Duterte in her 2022 vice presidential campaign. The firm paid for advertisements worth P19.9 million for her election.
(As of this writing, we are still awaiting responses to our findings from the Office of the President and the Vice President. We will update this story as soon as we receive them.)
Who can hold the executive to account?
The congressional hearings held in the past two weeks revealed a system of large off-the-books payments and conflicts of interest in flood-control projects. Evidence of collusion in the awarding contracts among construction magnates, public works officials, and lawmakers was presented. The scope and scale of the scandal has captured the public’s imagination—and ire, with angry citizens holding protests, including in front of contractors’ homes and offices.
In the past two weeks, public anger has resulted in the dismissal of public works officials and a change in the leadership of both houses of Congress.
Senate President Francis “Chiz” Escudero lost his post as head of the upper chamber after it was revealed that he had accepted a P30-million campaign contribution from Lawrence Lubiano, the president of Sorsogon-based Centerways Construction and Development Inc., a top government contractor for flood-control projects.
The Comelec is investigating Lubiano and Escudero for violating the Omnibus Election Code and looking into over 50 other contractors who contributed to election campaigns but has not yet named who those contractors and candidates are.
Earlier this week, House Speaker Martin Romualdez resigned from his post after questions were raised about hundreds of millions of pesos worth of infrastructure projects that were “inserted” into the national budget under his leadership.
The question is whether Congress can—or will—hold the highest officials of the land to account for their links to government contractors.
And will the Independent Commission for Infrastructure, established by the president on September 11, extend its scrutiny to the country’s two most powerful government officials?
The President’s Contractor-Donors
Construction tycoon Rodulfo D. Hilot Jr. built a fortune from government contracts. From 2016 to 2022, the yearly value of his company’s solo and joint contracts posted on the DPWH website fluctuated between P600 million and P2.6 billion. (Note: 2016 is the earliest year available in the DPWH’s Project and Contract Management Application website, from which this and other contract information was obtained. The website shows contracts sourced from each budget year, but some contracts may be awarded in the following year.)
In 2023, the first year that a budget had been enacted by the Marcos government under the leadership of the president’s cousin, former House Speaker Romualdez, the Hilot company was awarded P2.7 billion in infrastructure projects. A year later, the value of its contracts ballooned by almost P1 billion to a whopping P3.5 billion.
Rudhil Construction’s projects range from multipurpose buildings, roads, and bridges, to flood-control structures mainly in Zamboanga, Bohol ,and Misamis provinces. In some years, it got DPWH contracts in Cebu, Lanao del Norte, Davao City, Iligan City and Cagayan de Oro City.
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The Philippine Ports Authority and the Department of Agriculture had also picked Rudhil for at least four of their projects. PCIJ has yet to access all of the firm’s contracts with these agencies.
But a document uploaded online by the Philippine Ports Authority shows that Hilot’s company bagged a P243-million sewage treatment plant project with the agency in 2024. This is larger than any of its solo DPWH contracts posted on the department’s Project and Contract Management Application website.
Hilot is the chief executive officer of the Rudhil Group of Companies which, apart from engaging in construction, also runs a hotel, a resort, a sports complex, and a vineyard farm, according to a Facebook post of one of its companies.
In the 2025 midterm polls, he set his eyes in Congress as the second nominee of ONE COOP Party-list. But the group secured only one seat, which is currently occupied by Rep. Maria Kristina Jihan Glepa.
In 2016, the earliest year available in the DPWH’s Project and Contract Management Application website, Quirante Construction’s total contracts were valued at P315 million. All were awarded by Cebu-based district engineering offices.
It took five years before the firm’s annual contract costs reached P1.5 billion in 2021. The following year, it increased further to P1.9 billion.
But the change was dramatic in 2023. Quirante Construction’s total solo and joint contracts leaped to P3 billion—a billion-peso increase in just one year. Since then, the firm’s total contract awards have only risen, reaching P3.8 billion in just the first eight months of 2025.
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The company has constructed roads and multi-purpose buildings mostly in Cebu. But its ascent can largely be attributed to flood-control projects, which have increasingly dominated the firm’s contract portfolio in recent years. In 2025, almost 60% of the value of the contracts awarded to the company was for flood control.
According to the Sumbong sa Pangulo website, which listed flood-control projects marked completed from July 2022 to May 2025, Quirante Construction is the contractor with the 25th largest allocation from the public works budget. In Cebu, it had the second largest flood-control funds following QM Builders whose owner, Allan Quirante, happens to be Jonathan’s uncle, according to a source who has worked with the family.
There were some instances when QM Builders and Quirante Construction collaborated on contracts with the DPWH, according to data from the department’s Project and Contract Management Application.
The Vice President’s Contractor-Donor
The ties of Davaoeño contractor Escandor to the Duterte family include a government appointment, a campaign donation worth P19.9 million, and according to Rappler, a long friendship between the businessman and the former president.
In 2016, President Duterte named Escandor as his adviser on sports. In the years that followed, his firm Genesis88’s started raking in DPWH contracts that reached P1.9 billion in 2022, the last year under Duterte administration budget.
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DPWH’s Project and Contract Management Application website does not show any contracts won by the construction company in 2017. But PCIJ had earlier reported that Genesis88 handled a public-works project in Davao City that started that same year, despite the project being officially in the name of another company.
In 2018, Genesis88 bagged three DPWH projects in Davao City worth P289.5 million. All were rehabilitation projects for creeks and a main drain and priced at exactly P96.5 million each. In 2019, it had no contracts listed on the website.
From 2020 to 2023, construction of flood-control structures and revetments overtook its portfolio. These were also the years when its contract values experienced a steady rise. In 2024, however, Genesis contracts dipped to P1.2 billion.
Today Genesis88 is the top flood-control contractor in Davao del Sur, with the cumulative value of its flood-control projects reaching P2.9 billion, marked “completed” between July 2022 and May 2025, the first half of President Marcos’s term.
The Senators’ contractors
Hilot and Quirante both gave their campaign donations to Marcos Jr. while a number of their government contracts were still ongoing.
A 2022 PCIJ report said that it did not find Esdevco in the Philippine Government Electronic Procurement System database of bid and award notices. But Genesis88, the other Escandor company, was “listed as having government contracts.”
PCIJ also discovered at least six other nationally elected officials in 2022 received donations from individuals or entities who have ties to companies that transact with the government either through contracts or franchises. These are:
- Senator Francis “Chiz” Escudero
- Senator Joel Villanueva
- Senator Sherwin Gatchalian
- Senator Loren Legarda
- Senator Robin Padilla
- Senator Miguel “Migz” Zubiri
The stories can be found here and here.
Under the Omnibus Election Code, campaign donations from “natural and juridical persons who hold contracts or subcontracts to supply the government or any of its divisions, subdivisions or instrumentalities, with goods or services or to perform construction or other works” are prohibited.
It also prohibits campaign donations from entities who “have been granted franchises, incentives, exemptions, allocations or similar privileges or concessions by the government or any of its divisions, subdivisions or instrumentalities, including government-owned or controlled corporations.”
Election watchdogs have said that these provisions are a safeguard against conflicts of interest in government deals.
Comelec Chairman George Garcia told PCIJ that they have been “reenergized” to investigative contractor-donors “because of an admission of a candidate that he received a donation from a government contractor,” pertaining to Senator Escudero. He said that the commission’s “lack of personnel is the main reason” why it struggles to sustain probes on campaign donations.—With research from Christian Chua.
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