It is really bad, and it is not isolated to these projects. This happens in most countries of the world. These days politics are extremely corrupt. If you look at some international corruption rankings, they are a complete scam and joke. It does not even tell 10% of the real story.
Help Philippines, don’t let this just pass by like another headline.
How exactly do you think outsiders can help with this? At most other people's countries could make sanctions against it, but that would require something more major for happen.
Corruption globally, particularly in Southeast Asia, remains a serious challenge, with sharp disparities between countries. Overall, ASEAN has achieved slight improvements in the corruption index compared to a decade ago, but this progress is uneven and often hampered by political interests, weak oversight institutions, and the involvement of corruption in the infrastructure and natural resource sectors.
This index itself is useless and corrupt. Don't be fooled by such things.
This is the flaw of democracy, we got options to choose from A or B but what if both A and B are not fit to be elected? If we skip our vote, still someone from these two is going to get elected and that's the problem. Eradicating corruption is a long process especially when it lies into the roots of people's mindset and most of the time they don't even realize that they are committing a crime, it's just so normalised everywhere. Ultimate solution is to throw all the political parties and government officials and have a system to reelecta leader at any point of time will create fear among the elected ones.
Democracy sucks. It is the decision of the stupidest majority which of the few conmen are going to be stealing in the next cycle.