PLARIDEL – The dike meant to protect the Philippine town cost taxpayers nearly $2 million, but when a minister visited this month he found little more than dirt hastily dumped along the river’s banks. Residents of Plaridel, north of the capital Manila, could have told him what happened — contractors had only just begun a project that government officials marked “completed” more than a year earlier. The dike is one of more than 100 flood-control projects at the centre of one of the country’s biggest corruption scandals in decades. It has already sparked leadership changes in both houses of Congress, but the real impact is among communities left without protection, many of them strung along rivers in the Bulacan region. “We carry our children to school when the water is high,” Leo Francisco, a construction worker and father of two, told AFP in the village of Bulusan.
