Politics

PCIJ audit of election expense reports

All right to lie, cheat, bluff?
Election laws gray, untested

by Che de los Reyes and Karol Anne Ilagan

IT WAS 1992; Fidel V. Ramos had just been voted as president, and Joseph ‘Erap’ Estrada as vice president. Presidential bet Miriam Defensor Santiago was crying foul, saying she had been cheated. She would later file an electoral protest, but the Commission on Elections (Comelec) was apparently more interested in something else: conducting its first ever audit of the campaign contributions and expenses of candidates for president, vice president, and senators for the then recently concluded polls.

The Comelec, then headed by Christian Monsod, seemed serious, and even formed a committee to examine the books of account of candidates, political parties, donors, and media entities. Lawyer Josefina de la Cruz, who became part of that committee, also recalls that the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR), Commission on Audit (COA), and the National Bureau of Investigation served as Comelec’s “counterparts” in the initiative.

Read more... | Posted Thursday, August 12th, 2010
PCIJ audit of election expense reports

Party-list groups, 4 top bets
conspire to skirt caps on ads

by Annie Ruth Sabangan, Karol Anne Ilagan, and Che de los Reyes

THEY are avowed representatives of the poor and the marginalized, but in the May 10, 2010 elections, 12 party-list groups allied with two candidates for president, one for vice president, and one for senator splurged a staggering P426.16 million on television ads that aired in the last two weeks of the campaign period.

Where they got the millions to burn for these candidates, despite their claimed poverty, is the ambiguity. But why they burned millions on political ads that featured the four candidates, not their party-list groups, is the absurdity.

Read more... | Posted Wednesday, August 11th, 2010
Sidebar

Rebuffs & denials

by Karol Anne M. Ilagan

PCIJ tried to reach the political parties and candidates involved, with varying levels of success. Attempts to pin down Presidential Spokesman Edwin Lacierda, for example, were rebuffed. According to his staff, they are simply too busy and referred PCIJ to the Liberal Party.

Read more... | Posted Tuesday, August 10th, 2010
PCIJ audit of election expense reports

Top bets for Prez, VP, party-lists
in orgy of omissions, half-truths

by Karol Anne Ilagan and Che de los Reyes

BY ALL ACCOUNTS, the May 10, 2010 polls was the costliest ever in Philippine electoral history.

The top candidates for president and vice president alone spent P4.3 billion on political ads during the official 90-day campaign period, and another billion 90 days before the campaign commenced, according to Nielsen Media’s monitoring of tens of thousands of political ad clips.

But for various reasons, the May 10, 2010 elections could also go down in the country’s annals as a grand spectacle of lies, half-truths, and concealed truths foisted on the Filipino voters.

Read more... | Posted Tuesday, August 10th, 2010
Venture capitalists or true believers?

Only 308 donors funded
campaign for presidency

by Roel R. Landingin

AS A veteran fund-raiser for presidential candidates tells it, there are fewer awkward moments in the campaign than a meeting between the candidate and a potential donor, especially if they are seeing each other for the first time.

Recalling one such meeting ahead of the recent May 10 polls, the fund-raiser says that what actually lasted a fleeting 15 minutes seemed to take forever. “They talked about everything else except the money,” the moneyman tells the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) on condition of anonymity. “At the end, when there was nothing else to talk about, the donor just said ‘By the way, here’s something for the campaign.’”

Read more... | Posted Tuesday, July 20th, 2010
Sidebar

Risky start-ups?

by Roel R. Landingin

A CLOSE look at election spending reports of seven presidential candidates and three political parties in the May 10 polls reveals that election campaigns are funded in the manner and mold of financing for risky business start-ups.

Money comes mostly from personal funds, family members, and friends rather than a wide network of supporters of the political party, organization, or movement. In business, these private-equity sources of funding are ideal for ventures with low success rates but high pay-offs that are usually shunned by banks and the capital markets.

Read more... | Posted Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

Illicit list? Arroyo’s 977
‘midnight’ appointees

by Tita C. Valderama

LAWYERS at the Palace have been burning the midnight oil scrutinizing nearly a thousand appointments made by then President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo in various government agencies, including state-run corporations, from January this year until she bowed out of office on June 30.

One lawyer says the Presidential Management Staff (PMS) has so far tracked 977 Arroyo appointments in the last six months of her nine-year reign. “The list is growing,” says another lawyer involved in the rigid review of documents on the appointments but who is too timid to be named.

Read more... | Posted Monday, July 19th, 2010
Day after P-Noy proclaimed President

Arroyo made 13 ‘midnight
appointments’ on June 10

by Ed Lingao

SHE ALREADY created a furor with her “midnight appointments,” or appointments made on the eve of an election ban. Yet a month after the May 10, 2010 elections, then President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo still managed to sneak in a final batch of 13 appointments on the eve of her departure from office.

Arroyo signed the appointments on June 10, 2010 even as dusk had settled on her presidency. She did so seemingly oblivious to the fact that the day before, June 9, the joint congressional committee of Congress, which canvassed the votes, had already proclaimed Benigno Simeon Aquino III as the new President of the Republic.

Read more... | Posted Sunday, July 11th, 2010
Advocates to Congress, P-Noy:

Rush FOI law, observe
disclosure rule even now

by the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism

THE 15th Congress must adopt, refile and pass with dispatch the version of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act that was aborted in the 14th Congress because of the feigned absence of a quorum on the last session day of the House of Representatives last June 4.

In a statement, the Right to Know Right Now! Coalition of over 160 civil society groups and leaders said, “the new senators and congressmen may do well not to repeat the processes so they can save valuable time and even more valuable taxpayers’ money.”

Read more... | Posted Sunday, July 4th, 2010
136 make a quorum!

Four more lawmakers
present at FOI session

by Annie Ruth Sabangan and Justine Espina-Letargo

FOUR MORE members of the House of Representatives yesterday said they were among those wrongly named as absent — according to a list provided by Speaker Prospero Nograles to the media – during the roll call at the Session Hall last Friday, June 4, when the ratification of the Freedom of Information Act was scuttled for supposed lack of a quorum.

The four bring to eight the number of lawmakers erroneously tagged as not physically present during the roll call.

The eight bring to 136 – one more than the 135 threshold for a quorum in the 269-member House – the number of lawmakers that was needed to constitute a quorum and act on the motion to ratify the FOI bicameral conference committee report.

Read more... | Posted Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

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