PCIJ audit of election expense reports
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.
Sidebar
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.
PCIJ audit of election expense reports
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.
Venture capitalists or true believers?
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.’”
Sidebar
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.
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.
Sidebar
by Karol Anne Ilagan
PR EXPERT Jonas Campos observes that one reason that political ads failed to work for some party-list groups is because they used the wrong “channel.”
Campos is not trying to spark yet another network war. Rather, he is referring to party-list group ads that did not carry the organization’s message or advocacy and instead showed the faces of mainstream politicians or carried a major party’s slogan.
by Che de los Reyes
The net total spending on television, radio and print ads by the national candidates and party-list groups alone amounted to P4.3 billion across the 90-day official campaign period from February 9 to May 8, 2010.
Based on the PCIJ’s computation, 12-percent of the P4.3 billion corresponds to P517.3 million in expanded value-added tax (EVAT) revenues that should accrue to the public coffers.
by Beatriz Bermundo, Katreena Cosme and Alexandra Francisco
For a certain generation, re-elected Senator Juan Ponce Enrile will always be known as the former martial law administrator and the inveterate coup plotter. But for the 2010 elections, Enrile won on a campaign pitch that he is a man committed to the text generation.
“Gusto ko, happy ka!” Enrile declared in campaign advertisements.
The joys of automated democracy?
by Camille de Asis, Ivan Lim, Mark Tare and Angela Poe
Barring last-minute surprises in the election count, the Noynoy-Nognog tandem will lead the next casting at Malacañang Palace in the next six years, according to funny-boned Filipinos.
Nognog, dark-skinned Makati Mayor Jejomar Binay in real life, will also be installed as the country’s “first black vice president,” they say.
