IN ELECTIONS PAST, the top contributors to the campaign war chests of most candidates and their parties were big businessmen, captains of industry, and prominent tycoons who clearly had enough money to throw around.
But a curious trend has emerged from the May 2013 midterm elections: The big donors are now corporations with small to moderate capital, with some of them apparently operating at a loss or surviving on a few thousand pesos in profit.
The latest investigative offering of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism looks into this curious development of how small businesses with little capitalization and no clear revenue stream are apparently able to afford huge multimillion peso donations to their favorite candidate. It is a development that has piqued the interest of both the Commission on Elections, which is supposed to look into the accuracy of the donor reports submitted by the candidates, as well as the Bureau of Internal Revenue, which now wants to look into how companies that claim not to make enough money have more than enough to bankroll someone’s candidacy.
The first of this two-part report was written by PCIJ Executive Director Malou Mangahas and PCIJ Research Director Karol Ilagan. Read Part 1 here.
Part 2 is now available here.