Just read a report that 2 DPWH Bulacan officials, one a district engineer, the other a staff, blew around P300M (or over $5 million) each in casino gambling, even using aliases. This came out in the Senate Blue Ribbon probe on ghost flood projects.
One of them, Engr. Henry Alcantara, admitted playing 2–3 times a month, while his aide Brice Hernandez bet even bigger. Aside from that, they’re also accused of forging signatures and pocketing funds.
Question is, how can gov officials gamble that big when their salary won’t even cover a fraction of it? Corruption? Loans? What do you think?
source :
https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2025/09/02/2469907/dpwh-engineers-blew-over-p300-million-casinos-says-lacsonYou already answered your own question, they're clearly criminals who had access to the funds and were able to use them with little oversight. If they were going to the extent of forging signatures then they were most likely lying and trying to cover up this fraud using all means possible. It's likely that these engineers were in a fairly trusted position and maybe in an area of regional government that took a while to be audited, before ant red flags were thrown up. It's a bit ridiculous to see so much public money wasted and makes you question what vetting the casinos were using, if any, to determine the source of funds - but they were likely offshore and outside the jurisdiction of police.