TIMING ON CUE?
Lifted from
FEBRUARY 24, 2026. MANILA.
Teddy Adarna
The timing could not have been more surgical.
On the morning of February 23, 2026, the International Criminal Court opened its confirmation of charges hearing against former President Rodrigo Duterte in The Hague.
24 hours later
Eighteen former Marines marched forward with claims so staggering they could swallow the news cycle whole: that they personally delivered P805 billion in cash in suitcases, counted bag by bag inside a Valle Verde mansion. That they exchanged $2 million in funds allegedly intended for ICC investigators. That former senator Antonio Trillanes IV one of the most visible advocates for ICC accountability was handed money to manage the tribunal’s investigators on Philippine soil. That the entire shadow economy of corruption ran through one node: fugitive ex-congressman Zaldy Co, now hiding abroad, with Interpol on his trail and billions allegedly on his conscience.
The Philippines did not just wake up to a corruption scandal on February 24th. It woke up to a battlefield.
But to understand the battlefield, you must first understand who controls the artillery, because the story of the Ombudsman is, all by itself, the most important and least-discussed scandal in this entire inferno.
P805 BILLION. SAY THAT NUMBER SLOWLY.
Eight hundred and five billion pesos.
Not in a government ledger. Not in a wire transfer. In bags. In suitcases. Physically counted by human hands in a gated Pasig City compound, loaded back in and driven to powerful men.
Attorney Levito “Levi” Baligod representing the 18 former Marines testified that Co had staff assigned to verify the amounts in each bag before delivery. He alleged the deliveries reached all the way to Malacañang. He named Marcos himself. “Ang ugat at pinuno ng pagnanakaw sa ating bayan ay walang iba kundi si President Marcos,” he declared before the cameras.
If even a fraction of this is true, we are not looking at corruption. We are looking at the systematic looting of a Republic, a shadow state operating in parallel to the Philippine government, with its own logistics, its own verified accounting, its own chain of command, staffed by the very men sworn to defend the Filipino people.
Former Marines. Soldiers. Men who took an oath.
And according to their testimony, that oath led them not to a battlefield, but to a Valle Verde driveway, carrying suitcases of money.
Here is where the story turns from scandalous to strategically sinister.
Baligod alleged that before the ICC arrived in the Philippines, the former Marines were ordered to convert funds allegedly intended for ICC officers 💲2 million, approximately P115 million and that this money was handed to Trillanes to manage the tribunal’s investigators and curate which witnesses the court would interview.
The allegation is not merely that billions were stolen. The allegation is that the ICC itself was compromised, that the international court investigating Duterte’s drug war killings was infiltrated, managed, and fed stage-managed witnesses by a coordinated Philippine operation reaching into the Senate itself.
Notice what this accomplishes in a single press conference: it discredits Trillanes, delegitimizes the ICC, reframes the drug war investigation as a foreign-financed conspiracy, and floods the information space with allegations so enormous that accountability loses its address. Every journalist in the country must now choose between covering The Hague or covering Manila and Manila has just produced claims large enough to swallow The Hague whole.
@highlight
