Philippine Tech Chief Suspended Over Alleged Sweetheart Contracts With His Own Company
The Philippines' Ombudsman has hit pause on a senior tech official's career after concluding there's strong evidence he steered government contracts toward a company he founded and never properly left behind.
David Almirol, Undersecretary for E-Government at the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT), is facing administrative charges of grave misconduct, conduct prejudicial to the best interest of the service, and violations of the Code of Conduct and Ethical Standards for Public Officials and Employees. He has been suspended without pay for six months.
Almirol's history with Multisys Technologies Corporation is central to the case. He founded the software and services firm and ran it as CEO for over a decade before President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. personally recruited him to DICT in 2022 to modernise government digital services. A decent CV, until you look at what happened next.
Between 2023 and 2025, the Ombudsman alleges DICT awarded at least eight contracts worth more than ₱1.5 billion (around $24 million) to entities connected to Multisys. The deals spanned consultancy, e-government app deployment, cloud infrastructure, data centre colocation, web messaging services, and software subscriptions. Multisys's own financial records are reportedly among the evidence.
Philippine law required Almirol to divest his stake in Multisys within 60 days of taking up his government post. He allegedly missed that window, though he did eventually comply. Crucially, the Ombudsman stops short of claiming the contracts were awarded during the period he still held shares, which gives his defenders some room to manoeuvre.
The suspension is explicitly framed as precautionary rather than a verdict. The Ombudsman's concern is practical: leaving someone in post when they control the documents relevant to their own investigation is a fairly obvious conflict. Keeping Almirol in the building while investigators go through the files was never going to look good.
The case sits awkwardly within Marcos Jr.'s broader anti-corruption agenda, which he made central to his presidency and backed with a dedicated agency. Whether that agenda is being applied consistently, or selectively, is a question Philippine observers have been asking for some time.