Bangkok-based Filipinos protest graft at home

“We are here to demand that, if found guilty, all these people – the Senators and Congressmen, the government officials, the companies and NGOs, and all their accomplices who have conspired to fool us and to steal from us” – are punished. “We demand that they be investigated and held accountable under the law,” said a statement issued on Monday by the community. 

Led by businessman Camilo Lim, some 200 Filipinos who work and live in Thailand held a protest gathering in a Bangkok church on Monday night. 

The Bangkok gathering was held in solidarity with the tens of thousands who joined a mass protest in Manila on Monday, demanding the scrapping of the corruption-tainted development fund which allowed politicians and others to siphon money to their localities and into their own pockets via non-existent development schemes. 

The Philippines has been singled out as one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Of the 176 countries surveyed last year, Transparency International ranked the Philippines No 105, well below less developed countries in Africa such as Botswana, Rwanda, Namibia and Ghana. This level of corruption was the main reason the country remained poor and underdeveloped, the statement said.

“This is why we have lagged behind all our neighbours economically and socially. This is why many of us are here working as overseas foreign workers, because of the lack of gainful employment opportunities in our own country.”