Top bets, party-list groups
skirt ad caps together

Part 2 of our three-part report on the audit of the election expense reports of the candidates looks at how top bets for president and vice president conspired with party-list groups to get around caps on election spending. Presumably the defenders of the powerless and the voiceless, these groups seem to have allowed the themselves to be used as front and proxy for some of the country’s most powerful.

The party-list groups got some exposure when their names were flashed for a fleeting second in the last frame of the ads of Liberal Party candidates Benigno Simeon C. Aquino III and Manuel Roxas II, Nacionalista Party’s Manuel B. Villar Jr., and re-electionist senator Juan Ponce Enrile.

By then, these candidates had nearly maxed out their campaign airtime limits. But with the party-list groups as surrogates, they managed to lodge more ads on television.

Yet it seemed like an unfair exchange for the party-list groups. It was like having two riders on a bicycle, one positioned behind the other – the front rider (politician) basked in the glory of the limelight, and the back-rider (party-list group) wallowed in his shadow.

The advertising contracts and booking orders that media agencies submitted to the Commission on Elections (Comelec) enrolled these party-list groups as both the buyers and the products of millions of pesos worth of political ads with ABS-CBN Corp., GMA 7 Network, and TAPE Inc., producer of the popular noontime variety show, “Eat Bulaga.”

A number of the parties declared these advertisements as part of the costs they incurred in the Statement of Electoral Contributions and Expenditures (SECE) that they filed with the Comelec.

The actual TV ad clips and documents support the fact or irony that the supposed “marginalized” party-list groups spent millions to support well-funded national candidates.