1 hour ago
4
Upgrade to High-Speed Internet for only ₱1499/month!
Enjoy up to 100 Mbps fiber broadband, perfect for browsing, streaming, and gaming.
Visit Suniway.ph to learn
This is AI generated summarization, which may have errors. For context, always refer to the full article.
You don't need to be an investigative journalist to recognize a pattern followed by Romualdez’s associates. They're difficult to ignore once you see them.
People who’ve undergone security training know how important it is to break routines. The more predictable your habits are, the easier it is for someone to track your movements, anticipate your next step, or identify your vulnerabilities.
This is easier said than done, of course. Most of us, after all, build routines without realizing it. We take the same route to work, order from the same restaurants, and return to familiar habits because repetition makes life easier. That’s why a person’s digital footprint can often reveal more about them than they intend.
The same logic applies to money and assets. A single property purchase or business transaction may not tell us much on its own. But a clearer picture begins to emerge when similar transactions happen repeatedly, involving the same people, companies, or networks.
Hi! I’m Jodesz Gavilan, Rappler’s lead editorial researcher. Over the past year, I’ve worked on a series of investigations tracing a network of multi-million-dollar US properties connected to Leyte Representative and former House speaker Martin Romualdez.
My latest piece traces an estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, in the United States that was purchased for $6.9 million (P425 million) in September 2022 by a company associated with Andrew Casiño, a close business associate and fraternity brother of Romualdez.
You can read the full report here if you subscribe to Rappler+.
Some of the comments following the publication argued that the transaction was merely a coincidence, and that Casiño’s purchase should not be linked to Romualdez. That rhetoric overlooks how investigations like these work.
What caught my attention while reporting on the Connecticut estate was how familiar everything felt after months of doing the work that exposed the links to Romualdez.
It shows the same cast of characters and plot. A transaction involves a company whose member or leader is a close business associate or fraternity brother of Romualdez. The pattern is so brazen that you can just replace the names of entities or individuals involved, and yet it will still lead to the former House speaker.
For example, Golden Pheasant Holdings Corporation purchased a mansion in South Forbes Park in Makati City for P1.665 billion. The company’s president is lawyer Jose Raulito Paras, who sat on the boards of Romualdez-owned businesses, and also an Upsilon fraternity brother.
It’s the same as the transaction involving a mansion in the exclusive Sotogrande community in Spain, which was purchased by a Singapore-registered company named CECIL PROPERTY PTE LTD in January 2024 for at least 6.5 million euros (P444.5 million). A firm attached to CECIL can be traced back to Paras.
The transactions involving Casiño take the pattern a step further. Both the Connecticut property and another estate in Massachusetts were transferred via quitclaim deeds to companies registered in Delaware in July 2025.
Delaware, of course, is well-known for allowing a degree of anonymity that can make it difficult to determine who ultimately controls a company.
Any one of these transactions can be explained away on its own. But you don’t need to be an investigative journalist to recognize a pattern. They’re difficult to ignore once you see them.
Routines have a way of revealing themselves through repetition. Most people repeat the same routes, the same habits, and the same behaviors because it’s easier.
It turns out that government officials with their millions of pesos worth of assets can fall into routines too.
Spotting those routines, however, requires the kind of sustained reporting that follows trails despite the crazy political chaos. If you value journalism that uncovers patterns hidden in plain sight, consider supporting our work by subscribing to Rappler+! – Rappler.com
Inside the Newsroom is a newsletter delivered straight to your inbox every week. Visit rappler.com/newsletters to manage your newsletter subscriptions.
