How big is one billion pesos? Most Filipinos will never see that much in their lifetimes – yet in the flood control scandal, ?1 billion in cash-filled suitcases was allegedly delivered to a single official. And it gets worse: investigators have frozen ?180 billion linked to key players in the scheme.
Among the most explosive testimonies came from former engineers of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), who said ?1 billion in hard cash – not bank transfers – was delivered straight to Ako Bicol Rep. Elizaldy Co’s penthouse suite at the Shangri-La at the Fort in Taguig.
Then the scale got even bigger. An online report citing Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) data found that ?180 billion had flowed through 427 bank accounts linked to four contractor firms owned by flood-control ‘king and queen’ Curlee and Sarah Discaya – amounts that far surpass the suitcase deliveries linked to Co.
These figures aren’t just numbers on paper or footnotes in Senate hearings. They represent staggering volumes of taxpayer money – allegedly pocketed through ghost projects, bid-rigging, and systemic corruption – that could have funded public services, filled classrooms, and supported millions of Filipino families.
So just how much money is that?
One billion in hard cash: What does it look like? Baguio City Mayor Benjamin Magalong, a former special adviser to the Independent Commission for Infrastructure, demonstrated the dimensions of ?1 billion in stacked ?1,000 bills. It forms a block 5 feet long, 5 feet wide, and 4 feet high – almost the size of a small SUV.
But stacked vertically, the numbers become even more staggering. If one assumes a thickness of 0.10 to 0.12 mm per ?1,000 bill (an estimate consistent with many banknotes globally), then:
?1,000 bills stacked to reach ?1 billion (an estimated 1,000,000 bills) would measure approximately 100 to 120 meters in height.
That would be taller than the Statue of Liberty (around 93 meters including base), roughly equivalent to a 30-to-40-story building, and many times the height of the Rizal Monument (at 12.7 meters).
If ?1 billion were packed into suitcases as whistleblowers described, it would require 20 suitcases (each worth ?50 million). Multiply that by 35 billion – the alleged budget insertions attributed to Co over four years – and you’d be looking at 700 suitcases forming a trail longer than half a football field.
How does it compare to Filipino families’ needs?
According to IBON Foundation, a family of five in Metro Manila needs about ?1,220 a day, or roughly ?26,545 a month, to meet basic needs and live decently. By contrast, the newly approved minimum wage in the NCR stands at ?695 a day – a figure that still falls short of the actual cost of living, especially in the capital region.
In this context, ?1 billion is no longer just a large number – it becomes an almost unimaginable fortune.
If one household were to spend exactly ?1,220 a day, ?1 billion would last them over 2,200 years. Even at a significantly higher daily expense – say, ?50,000 a day – it would still take more than 54 years before that sum runs out. Now consider the perspective of a minimum wage earner bringing home ?695 a day. Assuming they work 261 days a year (standard for those not paid on weekends), it would take over 5,500 years to earn ?1 billion – and that’s only if every single peso was saved, with zero spending on food, rent, transport, or basic needs.
Even under a more generous estimate of 313 working days a year, it would still take around 4,600 years to reach ?1 billion.
In other words, the amount of public money allegedly lost in just one transaction could have sustained generations of Filipino families, or represented the entire working lifetime of thousands of minimum wage earners.
The Discaya contractors’ frozen accounts
But the AMLC findings dwarf the numbers above. According to multiple reports, roughly ?180 billion flowed through 427 accounts of four Discaya-linked contractors – St. Gerrard, St. Timothy, Alpha and Omega, and St. Matthew – between 2016 and 2025.
What does ?180 billion look like? It’s an almost unimaginable sum – 180 times ?1 billion. If stacked in ?1,000 bills, and assuming each note is approximately 0.10 to 0.12 millimeters thick, the pile would reach 18 to 21.6 kilometers high – more than twice the height of Mount Everest, towering far above the cruising altitude of commercial airplanes.
At IBON Foundation’s NCR family living wage of ?1,220 per day (?26,545 per month), ?180 billion could support over 678,000 families for an entire year.
And if you tried to spend it?
At a rate of ?1 million per day, it would take nearly 500 years (493 years) to run out. Even spending ?50,000 per day, it would last close to 10,000 years – 9,863 years, to be exact.
How long to earn these billions?
The so-called flood-control ‘king and queen,’ Curlee and Sarah Discaya, allegedly amassed ?180 billion through their four contractor firms in just nine years, and a government official was reportedly delivered ?1 billion in a single day – in cash. In contrast, most ordinary Filipinos would need multiple lifetimes to even approach such a figure.
A worker earning ?300/day would need 10,653 to 12,780 years to earn just ?1 billion, and an unfathomable 1.9 to 2.3 million years to reach ?180 billion.
On the NCR minimum wage of ?695/day, it would still take about 4,599 to 5,509 years to make ?1 billion, or around 827,874 to 991,683 years for ?180 billion.
Even someone earning ?1,000/day, far above minimum wage, would require 3,194 to 3,831 years to earn ?1 billion, and 574,943 to 689,580 years to hit ?180 billion.
This also translates to at least 5,500 minimum wage earners (earning ?695 per day and working every weekday) an entire year just to collectively earn ?1 billion – assuming they spend nothing on food, rent, or transport. To reach ?108 billion in the same period, it would take 595,000 workers under the same wage and working conditions. Yet whistleblower testimonies and bank records suggest these billions were being funneled in a matter of days, weeks, or a few deliveries – not decades. What regular workers would never achieve in a dozen lifetimes was, allegedly, carted away in suitcases and routed through hundreds of bank accounts in under a decade.
What billions could have done for farmers
Citing flood control allocations in the 2023 to 2025 General Appropriations Acts (GAAs) and a Senate study showing only 40 percent fund utilization, IBON Foundation warned that up to ?197 billion may be lost annually to corruption in flood control projects – money that could have gone to support Filipino farmers instead.
According to IBON’s analysis, that amount could have empowered the National Food Authority (NFA) to purchase up to 6.27 million metric tons of palay, equivalent to one-third (33 percent) of the country’s current annual palay production of 19 million metric tons – enough to exert significant influence on domestic market prices.
The group also pointed out that ?197 billion could have funded the construction of much-needed drying facilities to help farmers earn ?24 per kilo for clean, dry palay, including:
84,022 small-scale dryers (two per barangay at ?250,000 each)
42,011 large-scale dryers (one per barangay at ?550,000 each)
P700 billion lost to corruption
Amid the staggering billions now under scrutiny in the flood control corruption scandal, an earlier warning from a top anti-graft official has resurfaced. Back in 2019, then Deputy Ombudsman Cyril Ramos estimated that the Philippines loses around ?700 billion every year to corruption.
That amount, Ramos said, could have built 1.4 million housing units for the poor, funded medical assistance for 7 million Filipinos, or secured a rice buffer stock that would last more than a year. ‘With that amount,’ he added at the time, ‘no Filipino would get hungry.’ In 2024, the Philippines spent a total of ?1.56 trillion on health, according to the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA). That means ?700 billion, the amount said to be lost to corruption each year, accounts for nearly 45 percent of the country’s total health expenditure.
For far-flung and underserved communities where access to health services remains limited, that sum could transform the public health landscape – building rural health units, hiring medical personnel, and subsidizing care for millions.
To put it another way: Based on PSA data showing that the average Filipino spent ?12,751 on health care in 2024, a ?700-billion fund could have fully covered an entire year’s worth of medical needs for nearly 55 million Filipinos – almost half the country’s population.
The true cost of corruption
There is no image big enough to capture what corruption has stolen.
In the wake of the flood control scandal – with figures like ?1 billion stuffed into suitcases and ?180 billion frozen across hundreds of accounts – the numbers have become too massive to comprehend.
But as Inquirer editor Tony Bergonia once pointed out during a previous wave of corruption scandals, ‘To count from one to one billion, it’s estimated you would need 30 to 100 years.’
That’s longer than most people will live – and far longer than the prison time often served, if any, by those who plunder the public coffers.
But the true weight of these stolen billions isn’t just measured in stacks of money. It’s measured in lives.
‘Corruption is paid by the poor,’ Pope Francis once warned – and Bergonia echoed that truth: ‘The capacity of the poor to bear the burden of corruption is not as infinitesimal as the amounts of public money being misused or outright stolen by officials.’
‘In time, people bled dry of their wherewithal to make ends meet will be drawn to do either of two things – just die in place or rise to their feet, clinging to a knife.’
Here in the Philippines, it’s no longer just about missing funds. It’s the absence of rural health centers. The substandard school buildings. The flooded barangays. The children who dropped out because floodwaters reached the chalkboard, but help never came.
When even ?1 billion looks like a tower of money you could live inside – what does that say about the men and women accused of siphoning off tens or hundreds of billions more?
One word: Unimaginable.
Because corruption at this scale is no longer about money. It is about stolen futures.