The Sandiganbayan has ordered the arrest of former Iriga City Mayor Madelaine Alfelor over the alleged malversation, through falsification of public documents, of roughly ₱30 million in local assistance funds. Alfelor surrendered voluntarily and is now held at the Quezon City Jail's female dormitory. She faces the malversation charge alongside a separate count under Section 3(e) of the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act (Republic Act 3019), and the anti-graft court has recommended no bail.
The case traces back to a complaint filed with the Office of the Ombudsman, which found that beneficiary lists for the city's crisis-assistance disbursements — identified in the underlying complaint as the Assistance to Individuals in Crisis Situations (AICS) program, though at least one other outlet's sourcing described the funds as tied to the Social Amelioration Program — included people who were already dead and names investigators say were simply invented. In plain terms: the city government's own records, on their face, could not account for who the ₱30 million actually reached.
Two former city officials, Ruben delos Santos and Jean Bongon, are named as co-accused. Delos Santos has been taken into custody at the New Quezon City Jail in Payatas. Bongon remains at large. No case number was publicly disclosed in available reporting, and as of this writing neither Alfelor nor a representative for delos Santos or Bongon had issued a public statement responding to the charges.
The mechanics alleged here are not exotic: a program meant to catch people in genuine crisis — the kind of ad hoc, per-household cash aid that draws far less scrutiny than a big-ticket infrastructure contract — becomes an easy line item to pad once the beneficiary list stops being checked against who is actually alive. That the discrepancies allegedly reached ₱30 million before anyone flagged it is itself a comment on how thin oversight of these smaller, recurring local disbursements can be.
Context
Iriga City's Alfelor family has faced graft-adjacent scrutiny before; a "ghost" scholarship program at the city government drew a separate complaint against the mayor's office in past years. The case also lands amid a broader national reckoning over the integrity of social assistance and crisis-aid programs, which the Commission on Audit and the Ombudsman have flagged in other local governments for weak beneficiary verification. Pulpulitiko was unable to independently confirm from available reporting which specific program — AICS, SAP, or both — the ₱30 million passed through; that ambiguity is itself worth resolving once formal charge sheets become public.