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Did they read rules at all? 30 Senate
bets, pol parties file late, bad reports
NEARLY A year would seem plenty time for senatorial candidates and their political parties to study the campaign-finance rules and regulations for the May 2013 elections so that they could comply correctly. After all, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) issued Resolution No. 9476 that set out all these rules as early as June 22, 2012.
Yet as far as the submission of the Statement of Election Contributions and Expenditures (SOCE) goes, the election body’s Campaign Finance Unit (CFU) has found various deficiencies on the reports filed by almost all 33 senatorial candidates and nearly all their political parties. In fact, the CFU has recommended fines on almost all these candidates and most of the 12 political parties that nominated them because of this.
BIR chief ready to investigate
Pinoys with offshore accounts
THE BUREAU OF INTERNAL REVENUE (BIR) says it will investigate leads from the interactive database that reveals names of people from more than 170 countries, including the Philippines, associated with secret offshore tax havens released today by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) based in Washington, DC.
The ICIJ Offshore Leaks Database allows users to search for owners, officers and other parties linked to some 120,000 secret companies, trusts and funds created in offshore locales such as the British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Cook Islands and Singapore, the ICIJ announced in a statement. The database came from a hard disk containing 2.5 million files on secret offshore entities in more than a dozen tax havens leaked to the ICIJ last year.
