Negros Oriental has 117 flood-control projects in the national database the government opened to the public after last year’s flood-control scandal. Together they were awarded ₱4.51 billion.
Breaking News Negros Oriental has gone through all 117 line by line — matching each project in the Sumbong sa Pangulo database against the Department of Public Works and Highways’ own contract records — to answer four plain questions: how much was actually spent, who built them, how close the winning bids came to the government’s price ceiling, and how many of the projects went to the companies at the centre of the national scandal.
What follows is the procurement record, as the government publishes it. Whether any of it warrants investigation is for the Office of the Ombudsman and the Philippine Competition Commission to determine, not for this paper.
The numbers at a glance
- 117 flood-control projects in Negros Oriental in the national database
- ₱4,578,869,916 — the total approved budget ceiling for those projects
- ₱4,506,031,039 — the total actually awarded, about 1.59% below ceiling
- 34 contractor names hold the work; the top five hold 56.6% of the money
- 6 bidders on the typical project; 7 of the 117 drew only one bidder
- 53 of the projects — ₱2.10 billion, or 46.6% — sit in the 3rd District Engineering Office area
- 14 projects worth ₱648,508,072 are held by firms linked to Cezarah “Sarah” Discaya
- The 3rd District, whose caretaker from March 2023 was then-Speaker Martin Romualdez — now detained on a flood-control plunder charge he denies — holds 46.6% of the provincial total
Where the numbers come from
Two official sources, not one.
The project list comes from Sumbong sa Pangulo, the flood-control database the Office of the President launched in August 2025. It names every project, its location, its contractor, and the Approved Budget for the Contract — the ceiling price the government sets before bidding.
The peso figures come from the DPWH Transparency database, which publishes what each contract was actually awarded for, plus the number of firms that bid.
That distinction matters, and it is where most readings of this data go wrong. The Sumbong file carries a column labelled “contract cost” — but for 108 of the 117 Negros Oriental projects, that column repeats the budget ceiling, not the amount the contract was awarded for. Read at face value it suggests almost every project in the province was awarded at exactly the ceiling. Checked against the DPWH award records, not one of the 117 was. Every figure in this report is the amount actually awarded.
Across all 117, the ceilings totalled ₱4,578,869,916 and the awards totalled ₱4,506,031,039 — about 1.59 per cent below ceiling overall.
Who holds the most
Thirty-four contractor names appear across the 117 projects. The work is not spread evenly among them: the top five hold 56.6 per cent of the money, and the top three hold 43.5 per cent.
| # | Contractor, as recorded by DPWH | Projects | Awarded | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | PhilSouth Builders Inc. | 19 | ₱1,009,847,592 | 22.4% |
| 2 | Legacy Construction Corporation | 14 | ₱523,781,041 | 11.6% |
| 3 | Legacy Construction Corp. / Mighty Hok Summit (joint venture) | 8 | ₱424,619,759 | 9.4% |
| 4 | Jaime B. Ching Enterprises | 7 | ₱369,876,882 | 8.2% |
| 5 | Amethyst Horizon Builders | 5 | ₱223,124,453 | 5.0% |
Two entries in that table belong to the same firm in different forms. Legacy Construction appears once on its own account and once in a joint venture with Mighty Hok Summit — a separate arrangement with its own contracts. Counted together, Legacy’s own work and its joint-venture work come to ₱948.4 million, or 21.0 per cent — close behind the largest single holder. Mighty Hok Summit separately holds eight projects of its own worth ₱193.2 million.
Geographically the work is weighted south. The 3rd District Engineering Office covers 53 of the 117 projects and ₱2.10 billion — 46.6 per cent of the provincial total. The 2nd District office covers 27 projects worth ₱1.26 billion, the 1st District office 37 projects worth ₱1.15 billion.
By year, the bulk was let in 2022 (45 projects) and 2023 (36), with 31 in 2024.
How close the bids came to the ceiling
In a competitive bidding, the winning offer normally lands below the government’s ceiling, and by varying amounts.
For the 117 Negros Oriental projects, the median award came in 1.01 per cent below ceiling. The typical project drew six bidders. Seven of the 117 drew only one bidder.
Those are unremarkable numbers on their face. But one cluster inside them is not.
The Discaya count: 14 projects, ₱648.5 million
Five construction firms linked to Cezarah “Sarah” Discaya hold 14 of the 117 projects, awarded a combined ₱648,508,072 — 14.4 per cent of all flood-control money in the province.
This count is our own. It was produced by reading every one of the 117 projects in the government’s own database and identifying the contractor on each, not by following any previously published list. The Department of Public Works and Highways’ early review of the scandal put the Negros Oriental figure at 15; the current database, counted project by project, yields 14.
| Firm | Projects | Awarded |
|---|---|---|
| Amethyst Horizon Builders | 5 | ₱223,124,453 |
| Elite General Contractor and Development Corp. | 4 | ₱176,712,977 |
| St. Timothy Construction Corp. / Elite (joint venture) | 2 | ₱115,684,783 |
| YPR Gen. Contractor and Construction Supply Inc. | 2 | ₱88,355,661 |
| Alpha & Omega Gen. Contractor & Development Corp. | 1 | ₱44,630,199 |
Sarah Discaya is the beneficial owner of St. Timothy Construction Corporation. She was arrested in December 2025 over an allegedly non-existent ₱96.5-million flood-control project in Davao Occidental, and was granted ₱1-million bail by a Lapu-Lapu City court in July 2026. That case concerns a project in Davao Occidental, not Negros Oriental.
Twelve of the 14 sit in the 3rd District Engineering Office’s area. Seven are in Siaton alone. Twelve of the 14 were awarded in 2024.
One pattern in the numbers
Among the 117 projects, 11 of the 14 Discaya-linked contracts were awarded at a discount of exactly 2.00 per cent below the ceiling. Among the other 103 projects in the province, one was.
Ten of the contracts share an identical ceiling of ₱45,080,000 — and all ten are held by the Discaya-linked firms, across four different companies and five municipalities.
A 2 per cent discount is entirely lawful, and identical ceilings can reflect identically scoped projects designed as a batch. Neither figure is evidence of anything by itself. What can be said is narrower: this pricing pattern appears in these contracts and is rare in the rest of the province’s flood-control work.
And one number cuts the other way. If the concern is that competition was absent, the bidder counts do not support it: the Discaya-linked contracts drew a median of 12 bidders, double the provincial median of six. Only one of the 14 had a single bidder.
What this does and does not show
This is a record of what was budgeted, what was awarded, and to whom. It is not an audit of whether the structures were built, built well, or built at all — that requires inspection on the ground, and it is what the Office of the Ombudsman is doing across Cebu, Bohol, Eastern Visayas and Negros Oriental. In the first six months of 2026 the Ombudsman had 209 flood-control complaints under fact-finding investigation, roughly double the previous year.
The Independent Commission for Infrastructure, created by the President in September 2025 to investigate the flood-control anomalies, ceased operations on 31 March 2026 and turned its evidence over to the Ombudsman and the Department of Justice.
The district at the centre of it
Nearly half the province’s flood-control money — ₱2.10 billion across 53 projects, 46.6 per cent of the provincial total — sits in the area covered by the 3rd District Engineering Office. Twelve of the 14 Discaya-linked projects are there. So are seven projects in Siaton alone.
That district has had an unusual representation history. In March 2023, after the suspension of Rep. Arnolfo Teves Jr., then-House Speaker Martin Romualdez was named legislative caretaker of the 3rd District of Negros Oriental — one of several vacated districts he took caretaker roles over during the 19th Congress.
Romualdez was arrested on 7 September 2026 on a plunder charge arising from the national flood-control scandal, and is detained at the Quezon City Jail in Payatas. He has pleaded not guilty.
Two facts belong alongside it.
His charge concerns other projects, not these. It arises from the national flood-control investigation; none of the 117 provincial projects appears in it.
These contracts are awarded by the DPWH district engineering offices, not by a member of Congress. What a caretaker holds is the representation of the district and a hand in which projects get pushed for funding.
With those two facts stated, the dates are worth setting side by side. The caretakership began in March 2023. Of the 3rd District office’s ₱2.10 billion, ₱1.19 billion — 56.4 per cent — is in contracts dated 2023 or later. All twelve of the Discaya-linked projects in that district carry 2024 contract numbers, worth ₱532,823,290.
Those are dates on public records sitting next to each other.
Why this matters here
Flood-control money is not an abstraction in this province. It is the seawall at the back of a barangay in Tanjay, the river wall above a farm in Siaton, the dike that either holds or does not hold when the rain comes down the mountain.
Three things follow from the record above, and residents are entitled to weigh them.
The work is concentrated. Thirty-four names hold 117 projects, and five of them hold more than half the money. That is not unlawful and it may simply reflect which firms are large enough to bond a ₱45-million river wall. But a narrow field is a fragile one: when few firms can bid, prices are harder to test and a single underperforming contractor affects more communities at once.
It is concentrated geographically too. Nearly half the provincial total sits in one district engineering office’s area. Whether that tracks flood risk — and the south of the province does flood — or tracks something else is a question worth asking of the people who set the priorities.
And the province is inside a live national inquiry. The Ombudsman’s flood-control investigation covers Negros Oriental alongside Cebu, Bohol and Eastern Visayas, and investigators are checking project coordinates on the ground to find structures that were funded but never built. This report does not test whether any structure in this province was built; nothing in the award records can answer that. What it establishes is which structures were paid for, where they are, and who was paid to build them — which is what anyone would need in order to go and look.
Residents can check any individual project themselves. Sumbong sa Pangulo publishes each one with its location and coordinates, and the DPWH transparency site publishes the contract, the notice of award and the list of bidders for each contract ID.
A note on sources. Every project figure in this report comes from two official government sources and from nothing else: the Sumbong sa Pangulo flood-control database (Office of the President / DPWH) for the list of projects and their contractors, and the DPWH Transparency contract records for the amount awarded and the number of bidders on each — all 117 retrieved and matched one at a time. No project list compiled by any news organisation was used, and no figure here depends on one. That is deliberate: a compilation published by any outlet reflects the choices of whoever made it, including what it leaves out, while the complete official dataset does not. Dates and case developments — including the caretakership of the 3rd District and the flood-control plunder case — are taken from official statements, court and jail records as reported nationally, and House records.
Peso figures throughout are amounts awarded, not budget ceilings.
