In November 2021, at the height of the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee’s inquiry into the Pharmally scandal, Rose Nono Lin was asked about a 2019 Lexus registered in her name, a vehicle worth some P8.8 million. Her answer has since exemplified brazen display of unexplained wealth: “Natagpuan ko po ’yan sa garahe po namin.” She simply found it in her garage.

Lin was corporate treasurer and incorporator of Pharmally Biological, the firm investigators described as the parent of Pharmally Pharmaceutical Corp., which cornered billions of pesos in government contracts for face masks, face shields, personal protective equipment and test kits at the height of the pandemic. Her husband, Lin Weixiong, was Pharmally Pharmaceutical’s financial manager and a close associate of Michael Yang, the former economic adviser of then-president Rodrigo Duterte. Then-senator Richard Gordon, the blue ribbon chair, tagged Yang as the firm’s financier and guarantor. Citing corporate records, the senator called Lin a dummy for her husband, a charge she denied.

Lin had already filed her candidacy for Congress in the fifth district of Quezon City by the time the Lexus issue surfaced. She resigned from Lakas-CMD party, which revoked her nomination. She then snubbed hearing after hearing, until the Senate cited her in contempt and ordered her arrest. The district’s voters turned her down in May 2022. She ran again in 2025, and lost again.

That is the face Pharmally presented to the public. But the scandal was never merely a story of bureaucratic incompetence. It was the story of a scheme that looked at a crisis and saw profit, that saw a market in the sick and the dying.

Pharmally was a company with a paid-up capital of P625,000, an amount that would barely buy a sedan, much less a Lexus. Yet it bagged some P11.5 billion in contracts, the single biggest chunk of the government’s emergency pandemic procurement.

Senators found its supplies overpriced, some of them substandard, and its test kits bought at roughly double what private suppliers were offering. When asked, then health secretary Francisco Duque III pointed to the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) as the procuring agency. The DBM pointed back at the Department of Health’s purchase requests. In short, nagturuan ang DOH at DBM.

On October 16, Ombudsman Jesus Remulla announced the filing of an P11-billion plunder complaint against 46 respondents over the anomalous procurement of pandemic supplies. The list includes Pharmally’s officers, Lin and her husband, Yang, and former head of the DBM procurement service Lloyd Christopher Lao. Thirteen of them, the Ombudsman said, can no longer be located.

It is worth remembering why this took five years. 

The Senate committee’s report recommending plunder charges never reached the floor. Duterte’s Senate allies and fence-sitters did not sign the report. It died with the 18th Congress. Remulla’s predecessor, Samuel Martires, filed graft charges, not plunder, saying there was no evidence any official had amassed ill-gotten wealth. Lao was eventually haled to the Sandiganbayan for graft.

Money in crisis

Pharmally was not an aberration. It was the purest expression of a pandemic response grounded on impunity, indifference, and greed. 

There was money, plenty of it. Money that should have protected families, health workers, and other medical frontliners but went to dubious business entities like Pharmally. Money that should have shored up a public health system on the verge of collapse, or extended temporary relief for qualified beneficiaries. The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) left P780.71 million in “ayuda” unused, depriving at least 139,300 qualified families. Government kept pouring billions into roads and bridges, as if infrastructure could lead us out of a pandemic. What it did not find was the urgency and the focus to get help to people who needed it, despite a state of emergency that was supposed to cut red tape.

Most governments treated the pandemic as a public health crisis. The Duterte administration treated it as a public order problem. We got checkpoints, curfews, combat-ready police and scientifically dubious rules enforced with the zeal of martial law. Quarantine violators were herded into cramped jail cells, and in one Laguna barangay, dog cages. Winston Ragos, a former soldier, was shot dead at a Quezon City checkpoint. The pandemic did not slow down the administration’s drug war and red-tagging. Drug-related killings persisted, and in March 2021, police raids in Calabarzon left nine activists dead in a single day.

We earned the distinction of having one of the longest lockdowns in the world with little to show for it. While our neighbors reopened and recovered ahead of us, we were still told to wear face shields.

And while the public was preoccupied with survival, the powerful saw room to maneuver.  House allies revived Charter change. Congress railroaded the approval of the anti-terror law after Duterte certified it as urgent. These political projects proceeded from the same logic of Pharmally’s operators: that people too afraid of the virus and too worried about their next meal would be too exhausted to be angry.

Whether the prize was money or power, there were those in and around government who regarded the pandemic not as a crisis to be managed but as an opportunity to be exploited.

Millions of Filipinos went hungry during those years. Many lost jobs, businesses, and loved ones. Health workers died without adequate protection. And for five years, a Lexus sat in a garage, a monument to Duterte-era impunity.

The Ombudsman’s complaint is a beginning, nothing more. Whether it prospers or dies another quiet death will tell us whether accountability in this country is real or merely performative. Thirteen respondents can no longer be found. The others should be on an immigration lookout list by now. And the rest of us should never forget the Lexus in the garage. – Rappler.com

Joey Salgado is a former journalist, and a government and political communications practitioner. He served as spokesperson for former vice president Jejomar Binay.