The country’s most luxurious cars — including two smuggled Bugatti Chirons — were registered not through the government’s new digital platform, but through an obsolete Land Transportation Office (LTO) system that should have been decommissioned two years ago, investigators have confirmed.
This revelation has placed the spotlight on the LTO’s continued use of its outdated Stradcom IT system, a legacy platform long criticized for weak security, paper-based verification, and susceptibility to manipulation.
Despite a formal phase-out plan and a new replacement system already in place, the LTO allowed Stradcom’s database to remain active — creating a loophole now at the center of one of the country’s largest smuggling and corruption scandals.
The two 2023 Bugatti Chirons, worth more than ₱300 million combined, were illegally brought into the country and later discovered to have been registered with the LTO using the old Stradcom system, rather than the new Land Transportation Management System (LTMS) developed by Dermalog of Germany.
According to internal reports reviewed by investigators, the Stradcom system was no longer supposed to be operational after August 2023, following a commitment made before Congress to fully migrate to LTMS.
But a December 2023 LTO memorandum allowed the indefinite parallel use of both systems.
“This dual operation created a digital blind spot,” a senior transport official familiar with the investigation said. “The old system had no connectivity to the new one, no shared database, and no way to digitally cross-check customs or importation documents. That’s exactly how the smuggled Bugattis slipped through.”
A Bureau of Customs (BOC) search warrant report tagged 12 luxury vehicles linked to the Discaya couple — Sarah and Curlee — whose construction firms are also under investigation for alleged “ghost” infrastructure projects.
All 12 vehicles, including Rolls-Royce, Bentley, and Mercedes-Benz models, were registered using the Stradcom IT platform.
The certificates of stock reported (CSRs) for these vehicles were manually processed on paper, without any digital copies stored in the LTO’s database.
“It’s uncertain whether these records even still exist in physical archives,” the report said, underscoring the difficulty of tracing provenance and customs payment records.
Despite repeated warnings from the Commission on Audit (COA) and the House Committee on Transportation, the LTO leadership has yet to shut down the legacy system. Instead, both databases continue to operate in parallel — an arrangement experts describe as “a perfect storm for fraud.”
The Department of Transportation (DOTr) and the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) are now probing possible collusion among LTO personnel who allegedly used the Stradcom platform to register vehicles without Bureau of Customs clearance.
An internal LTO report admitted that fraudulent or incomplete importation papers — referred to by one official as “hocus pocus documents” — were accepted during processing. These transactions, investigators believe, could not have occurred without the knowledge or cooperation of key insiders.
The persistence of the Stradcom system dates back to 2016, when the LTO and Stradcom Corporation — then owned by businessman Cesar Quiambao — signed a phase-out agreement. While Stradcom’s driver’s license module was decommissioned in 2021, the vehicle registration module lingered for years.
By late 2023, under the tenure of LTO chief Vigor D. Mendoza II, the agency formally authorized continued use of the old system “pending full integration” with LTMS.
That decision now lies at the center of mounting scrutiny from lawmakers and oversight bodies.
