BATANGAS 1st District Representative Leandro Legarda Leviste on Wednesday released to the public the “Cabral Files” detailing ₱721B of projects in the 2025 DPWH National Expenditure Program (NEP).
The projects were divided among over ₱401B of budgets said to be “Allocable” by District Congressmen, ₱14B proposed by Partylists, ₱20B proposed by Senators, other extra budgets allocated to them, priority multi-year projects of DPWH, and ₱161B of suspicious lists of projects, as Leviste flagged in Monday’s Senate Blue Ribbon Committee hearing.
Leviste said the ₱161B of projects have tags of OP (ES/SAP), F1, BINI10, OT 2, LEADERSHIP, and CENTI2025. Most of these are flood control projects, and include the most overpriced projects in Leviste’s district, such as a ₱300M budget for streetlights that was eventually awarded to a contractor at the price of over ₱230,000 per streetlight. He noted that over 90% of these or similar projects can be found on the DPWH transparency portal along with data on the contractors they were awarded to in 2025.
Leviste also presented a list of ₱213B DPWH projects funded by Unprogrammed Appropriations (UA) in 2023 and 2024, noting that UA releases to the DPWH in 2024 followed the transfer of ₱167B of funds from PhilHealth and PDIC to UA. Unlike regular appropriations, DPWH projects funded by UA were selected not by Congress but DPWH, supposedly as “priority projects which are crucial in ensuring the achievement of the President’s Eight-Point Socioeconomic Agenda”, and that most of these projects were flood control. Leviste cited the example of a UA project from his district: a ₱48M contract for the bleachers of a swimming pool.
Leviste presented the list of the top contractors of the projects from the ₱161B of suspiciously-tagged lists from the files of USec Cabral, and found the top 15 contractors won an estimated 40% of the identified contracts, and from the ₱213B of UA-funded projects, the top 15 contractors won an estimated 30% of the identified contracts. Just as the DPWH has questioned how a few contractors cornered a high percentage of flood control contracts, Leviste said such a high concentration of contracts awarded to a few contractors at prices so close to the approved budgets for the contracts may indicate possible anomalies in the bidding of these projects.
Unlike projects “Allocable” to the District Congressman, Leviste said that DPWH should answer for the inclusion into the budget of these so-called “Outside Allocable” as well as UA-funded projects — and if there are anomalies that give rise to suspicions of corruption, then it is all the more important to know who are the proponents that made DPWH accept such large budget allocations. Leviste emphasized that he is not accusing anyone of corruption, and is calling for transparency to help determine who benefited from the inclusion of these projects in the budget.
Leviste ended by presenting a document entitled “LIST OF EDWIN GARDIOLA’s DPWH PROJECTS As of August 28 2025” that was recently given to him by a DPWH whistleblower. The document lists ₱22B of projects that were supposedly included in the budget through the NEP, UA, and Bicam in 2023, 2024, and 2025. While the document has not yet been verified by the DPWH, Leviste said that it aligns with other DPWH records, and that he is asking DPWH to verify the document—especially as many of the projects listed ended up being awarded to companies owned by the family of Congressman Edwin Gardiola based on DPWH records.
If true, Leviste said the document raises two questions: First, if the DPWH has documents showing that projects proposed in the budget by certain Congressman were eventually awarded to companies linked to them, why has this not yet been used to build cases? And second, does this mean the DPWH has records of proponents in the NEP, Bicam, UA and insertions in the whole DPWH budget, and can this be shared to the public?
