PRESIDENT RODRIGO R. Duterte is already on his second year as the country’s chief executive, but the polls that clinched him that post continue to bedevil the Commission on Elections (Comelec) – and with reason. Indeed, despite giving the candidates in the May 2016 elections a controversial three-week extension to submit their respective election-spending reports, thousands of candidates and a dozen political parties and party-list groups still failed to submit the required documents.

ALL THE CANDIDATES and political parties in the May 2016 elections received sundry donations from an amorphous mass of donors. All, too, are required to report these to the Commission on Elections’s Campaign Finance Office (CFO).

THE CANDIDATES for president, vice president, and senator, and their political parties who ran in the May 2016 elections received sums of donations but also incurred sums of expenses.

GERMELINA I. Taylor, Wilbert T. Lee, Danilo E. Suarez, and Teddie E. Rivera were among the 10 biggest donors of then presidential candidate Jejomar C. Binay. The four alone gave Binay P172.3 million altogether – except the money wasn’t really theirs.