Category: Investigative Reports

Nancy Binay agent writes PCIJ: Pol ads only P51M, not P82.8M

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THE ADVERTISING agent of senatorial candidate Ma. Lourdes Nancy Binay (United Nationalist Alliance) on Friday took exception to a PCIJ report that his client has aired and booked P82.8 million worth of political advertisements, based on contracts submitted by print and broadcast media agencies to the Commission on Elections (Comelec).

Tom Banguis, Jr., Chairman/CEO of Mediaforce Vizeum, Binay’s advertising agent, said that Binay has so far incurred “only P51 million in political advertisements” for the first 60 days (Feb. 12 to April 10, 2013) of the 90-day official campaign period.

Mr Banguis wrote: “We suspect that your Comelec sources did not properly distinguish between aired spots and importantly, those booked for future airing. Since we have booked Ms. Binay’s ads to cover her campaign up to May 11, it is likely that your source may have provided data on her total booking for the whole election campaign.”

A more careful reading of the PCIJ story should have clarified matters to Mr. Banguis. The PCIJ stands by its story.

The story precisely stated that the P82.8-million figure represented the political ads “aired, published, and booked” for Binay and the other candidates, according to advertising contracts that media agencies have signed and sealed with the candidates, the political parties, and party-list groups.

Media agencies are required in law to submit to the Comelec copies of all advertising contracts, broadcast logs, and telecast orders after every 30 days of the campaign period.

The PCIJ story was based on the documents that the media agencies had submitted to the Comelec for the period covering Feb. 12 to April 10, 2013, the first 60 days of the 90-day official campaign period for national candidates.

The media agencies, not the Comelec, reported the fact of the purchase of political ads for Binay during the period covered in their reports.

It must be noted that the major networks enforce a “pay before broadcast” policy among its advertising clients, which entails payment of advertisements before actual airing date.

The PCIJ story looked at the political ad expenses for and by the candidates and the political parties, according to the contracts submitted to Comelec.

Because the contracts had been signed and submitted to the Comelec, the values of the ads may be clearly considered as expenses incurred for and by the candidates.

The PCIJ has yet to aggregate the total airtime that the candidates have incurred, pending the airing of all their booked ads.

The PCIJ story had precisely noted that some of the political ads had been booked for broadcast up to May 11, 2013, the last day of the campaign period.

The documents from the media agencies showed that this was the same case with Binay’s UNA party and Binay’s party-mate, Cagayan Rep. Juan ‘Jack’ Ponce Enrile Jr., also clients of Mediaforce.

Like Mediaforce, however, other advertising agencies had also booked ads for their respective clients scheduled for airing until May 11.

They include Zenith Optemdia for San Juan Rep. Joseph Victor Ejercito and the Bagong Henerasyon party-list group; Mediacom for Aurora Rep. Edgardo Angara Jr., Havas Media Ortega/Mejah for re-electionist senator Loren Legarda, Tiger 22 Media Corp. for Grace Poe-Llamanzares, Message Bureau Inc. for re-electionist senator Francis Escudero, and MultimediaScape Inc. for former senator Ma. Ana Consuelo Madrigal.

Angara, Legarda, Poe-Llamanzares, Escudero, and Madrigal are candidates of the Team PNoy coalition led by President Aquino’s Liberal Party.

In addition, the following party-list groups have also procured political ads with May 11 as “finish date” of airing, on “direct” arrangements with the media agencies — ABAKADA, ABS, Ading, AKO Bikol, and AMS.

Below is the full text of the letter that Mediaforce sent to PCIJ:

Ms. Malu Mangahas
PCIJ

Ms. Mangahas,

This is to call attention to the PCIJ article “P1.3 Billion Pol ads aired, booked” as it contains inaccurate information on the ad spending of the senatorial candidates for the period February 12-April 10. In particular, Nancy Binay’s spending for the period was erroneously reported as P82.8 Million.

Based on ad contracts submitted to the networks, Ms. Binay’s actual expenditures amounted to only P51 million for the said period. Based on Nielsen estimates, the other candidates expenditures were Villar P 63.9 Million, Cayetano P59 Million, Aquino P56 Million, Enrile P54 Million, and Poe P48 Million. Team UNA expenditures were only P45.5 Million. These figures are significantly different from those the PCIJ reported. Please refer to attached. Please do not hesitate to call us for any further clarification you may find necessary.

We suspect that your Comelec sources did not properly distinguish between aired spots and importantly, those booked for future airing. Since we have booked Ms. Binay’s ads to cover her campaign up to May 11, it is likely that your source may have provided data on her total booking for the whole election campaign.

We would appreciate your rectification of the said PCIJ report. Thank you and best regards.

Tom Banguis, Jr.
Chairman/CEO
Mediaforce Vizeum

PCIJ launches MoneyPolitics online

Ed Lingao Leave a comment

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THE PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM (PCIJ) is proud to announce the launch of its MoneyPolitics website, a new rich database meant to enable citizens with an online resource, research, and analysis tool on elections, public funds, and governance in the Philippines.

The website, MoneyPolitics.PCIJ.org, was developed with a three-year grant from the Open Society Foundation (OSF). It will go online next week.

The site aggregates the cache of documents and databases that the PCIJ has amassed in its 24-year existence on public finance records; statements of assets, liabilities, and net worth (SALN); election spending reports; civil works contracts; graft and corruption cases; profiles of elective and appointive officials; data on elections and political families; and socio-economic statistics across the Philippines.

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PCIJ’s Malou Mangahas explains the concept behind the Money Politics site

MoneyPolitics is designed to serve as a ready-to-access tool for citizens, journalists, civil society groups, policy analysts, scholars, and public agencies and regulators. The site links and loops information enrolled in public documents to allow readers to discern how money in politics drives and defines policy and governance in the country.

PCIJ Executive Director Malou Mangahas said that the PCIJ Library has 57 gigabytes of digital information, with more than 6,400 unique files on elective and appointive officials from mayor to the Presidents, dating to as far back as 1998.

The 57 gigabytes of digital files of the PCIJ represent just a small portion of the total cache of raw source documents that the PCIJ has collected in the course of the work on investigative reports, books, video documentaries, and training seminars by its writers, editors, researchers, and fellows.

Using the OSF grant, the PCIJ in 2011 started digitizing, aggregating, and organizing datasets for MoneyPolitics using as backbone the cache of documents that it has gathered from its birth in 1989.

More public documents were acquired to bridge the gaps in data, as well as to collect information on local elective officials and appointive officials from the other branches.

Some of the files featured in MoneyPolitics come from documents that are no longer publicly available, or had been lost over the years.

Some election spending reports, for example, had been burned in the fire that gutted the old office of the Commission on Elections in Intramuros, Manila, years ago. However, the PCIJ had managed to keep copies of these files in its library.

A work in progress, MoneyPolitics will feature a steady harvest of new and more datasets in the coming years, or in time for the synchronized national and local elections in 2016.

PCIJ Research Director Karol Ilagan said MoneyPolitcs features four content categories.

Public Profiles offers information on elective and appointed officials  from mayors, vice mayors, and councilors on the local level, up to President and Vice President, as well as from the judiciary, the constitutional commissions, the armed services, and some government-owned and -controlled corporations.

The datasets include time-series information on the career, wealth, and election donors and expenditures of public officials.

Also featured under this tab is the Social Network of the official, or data on his/her business interests and financial connections, family ties, and election donors.

A page under the Public Profiles tab is Public Spending, which focuses on pork barrel releases and disbursement by the senators and congressmen, and internal revenue allotment for the local government officials.

Campaign Finance, the second tab, uploads the statements of election contributions and expenditures (SECE) that elective officials had submitted to the Commission on Elections since 1998. This tab will allow the public a peek into how much officials spend just to bag their positions in government.

The third tab, Public Funds, presents information on how government raises revenues and spends public funds. These include data on the yearly budgets, allocations by departments, lump-sum items in the national budget such as special purpose funds and pork barrel allocations.

The fourth tab, Elections and Governance, offers data on governance indicators, political clans, and elections and socio-economic statistics for provinces, towns, and cities of the country.

Ilagan added that the PCIJ would also like to encourage the public to be more proactive by donating or uploading documents, especially on the local level.

PCIJ Researcher Rowena Caronan said development work on MoneyPolitics involved months of haunting the halls of the Commission on Elections, Office of the President, the Office of the Ombudsman, among many other public agencies that are repositories of documents, to request and photocopy official records.

At times, Caronan said, the PCIJ staff had to spend entire weeks just photocopying documents. This, however, was only the first step. The PCIJ have had to scan, digitize, organize, and aggregate the data enrolled in the documents in Excel, spreadsheet, CSV, and other formats to allow for sorting and analysis as datasets.

Interestingly, Caronan also gave everyone an idea of just how inaccessible some public documents are to the public, not just because of a culture of secrecy in some agencies but also because of the prohibitive costs of reproducing the documents.

For example, Caronan said the Office of the President charges five pesos per photocopied page, while the Civil Service Commission charges P30 per page. In some other agencies though, she said public records are available online and at no cost at all on requesting parties.

The PCIJ also had to do scraping and scripting of the data available on government websites to develop some of the pages of MoneyPolitics.

 

Understanding the clans of Maguindanao

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CULTURAL NUANCES, economic and historical contexts, and a bewildering political milieu – understanding all these factors and how they relate to each other is the only way one can hope to understand the persistence of political clans and their continued dominance in Philippine politics.

During the launch of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism’s (PCIJ) series of stories on the clans of Maguindanao, several experts stressed the need for journalists to go beyond the counting of names and listing of numbers of the political candidates in order to better explain why the clans still reign supreme in the province.


PCIJ’s Malou Mangahas on the objective of the PCIJ project

The PCIJ stories and a video documentary on the clans of Maguindanao were presented to the public in a briefing/forum in Quezon City last April 11. Joining the activity were several political, social, and cultural experts from both Manila and Maguindanao. The project was assisted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Commission on Human Rights.

The Maguindanao study is only the first of a series of efforts to better understand and explain the persistence of the clans in Philippine politics. While Maguindanao serves as the pilot province for the initial effort, the PCIJ will be conducting similar studies in other island groups in Visayas and Luzon. This, as Maguindanao is far from the only province in the country with an army of political families that are dominating a particular area, says Asian Institute of Management Policy Center director Ronald U. Mendoza.

Atty. Laisa Alamia, chairperson of the Regional Human Rights Commission for the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), said the PCIJ study was a very good start to understanding the nature and characteristics of dynasties wherever they may be.


Atty Laisa Alamia of the Regional Human Rights Commission on the importance of context

“This is a good start. The challenge is for all of us to continue doing this and for PCIJ to continue also doing this to help us in trying to find solutions to the problems in the ARMM,” Alamia said in the forum.

AIM’s Mendoza also endorsed the PCIJ investigative report as a model for looking into the historical and political contexts of the dynasties in the country.


AIM’s Dr. Ronald Mendoza on the national context

Another guest, Mussolini Lidasan of the Al Qalam Institute of the Ateneo de Davao, was a good example of the importance of nuancing in the reportage of dynasties. A Datu, Lidasan is one of many clan members who are engaged in civil society work to strengthen political and social structures in his home province.

The PCIJ series on the Maguindanao clans may be read here:

Ampatuans, web of kin, warp Maguindanao polls

Maguindanao’s misery: Absence of officials, absence of rage, poverty

Nat’l politicos prop dynasties as surrogates to win polls

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Owning up when outed

Ed Lingao Leave a comment

IT REALLY IS indeed diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks as Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism Executive Director Malou Mangahas aptly wrote in her April 5 article, “Repentant, reticent, rude,” on how local Philippine officials reacted to a PCIJ report identifying them as owners of offshore bank accounts.

Unlike most of the public officials here who have also been outed for having offshore accounts in the tax havens of the Caribbean Isles, Mongolia’s deputy speaker in parliament simply admitted, showed remorse, and announced he was considering resigning from office.

“I shouldn’t have opened that account,” Bayartsogt Sangajav, deputy speaker of Mongolia’s parliament was quoted in an article by Emily Menkes and Marina Walker Guevara for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

Bayartsogt is one of at least a dozen or so public officials who have been outed by the global investigative reporting project led by the ICIJ based in Washington DC. For the past 15 months, some 86 investigative journalists from 46 countries had been vetting and validating some 260 gigabytes of data which include at least 2.5 million files and more than 2 million electronic communiques.

“I don’t worry about my reputation. I worry about my family. I probably should consider resigning from my position,” Bayartsogt said when ICIJ confronted him about his offshore holdings.

“Bayartsogt, who says his Swiss account at one point contained more than $1 million, became his country’s finance minister in September 2008, a position he held until a cabinet reshuffle in August 2012,” the ICIJ article reads in part.

Bayartsogt had attended “international meetings and served as governor of the Asian Development Bank and the European Bank of Reconstruction, pushing the case for his poor nation to receive foreign development assistance and investment.”

The ICIJ article also reported that the deputy speaker was also “at the forefront of encouraging foreign mining and other companies to move into Mongolia.”

The investigative reporting project looked at 122,000 offshore companies or trusts, about 12,000 intermediaries (agents or “introducers”), and some 130,000 records of the people and agents who run, own, benefit from or hide behind offshore companies. Instead of just uploading the raw documents online, ICIJ decided to partner with journalists and media agencies – including the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism – to check out and verify the data. The project has been touted as the one of the biggest cross-border investigative partnerships in journalism history and one of the biggest financial leaks in history.

Here in the Philippines, pubic officials who have been outed for having offshore companies and trusts in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) include Ilocos governor Maria Imelda “Imee” Marcos-Manotoc, Senator Manny B. Villar, Jr and senatorial wannabee Joseph Victor G. Ejercito. Marcos had ignored the PCIJ’s inquiries, while Villar had acknowledged the account, claiming it was only a shell account with $1 inside. For his part, Ejercito in turn was evasive, and implied that the PCIJ was being used to derail his senatorial bid.

International experts say that for low-income countries such as Mongolia and the Philippines, funds that are hidden in tax havens affect the economic growth of the host countries of the wealthy elite who have opted to invest in offshore account and trusts because the “vital financial resources are stashed abroad rather than used to build up domestic infrastructure and productive capacity.”

The advocacy group, Tax Justice Network, claims that the total amount of funds hidden in tax havens comprise a third of the world’s wealth. Tax Justice Network is a non-government organization and is a staunch advocate against tax havens. James Henry of Tax Justice Network has estimated that the “stock of flight capital out of the Philippines reached $97 billion as of 2010.” This amount is more than the country’s external debt of only $60 billion that year as estimated by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP).

According to former undersecretary of the Department of Finance Milwida Guevara, “the intention is to hide the transactions or hide their income so they made use of tax havens or places where there are no rules on transparency.”

“It’s hypocritical that they are sponsoring legislation that calls for faithful compliance with laws. At the same time, they are themselves trying to get away with it,” Guevara, who is also one of the founders of the Movement for Good Governance, said.

Maguindanao’s misery in excelsis: ‘Capitol on wheels’, absentee execs

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OVER THE LAST forty years, the seat of power in the province of Maguindanao has moved location six times, or just about anywhere its governor wishes o hold office. It has been a virtual “capitol on wheels.”

“The problem we have observed in Maguindanao is the new Governor always transfers the provincial capitol,” says Bobby Taguntong, Maguindanao spokesman for the Citizens Coalition for ARMM Electoral Reform or CCARE, a civil society group pushing for reforms in the election process in Mindanao. “Maybe we can suggest to the national government to make the provincial capitol mobile, perhaps even install tires.”

It is far more than an issue of confusion and inconvenience for those who need to conduct business in the capitol, wherever it may be relocated to next. Rather, the tale of the moving capitol symbolizes a bigger problem seen in places where governance is more personal than political, where families overrule political parties, and where blood trumps ideas and ideologies.

But the misery of inefficient and poor governance that is Maguindanao does not end there. Far too many candidates from a dozen political clans are running yet again in May 2013. This is amid the picture of absentee local executives that repeats in many of the 36 towns of the province. These candidates seem so excited to claim and grab the perks of office, but not to serve and work, when elected.

Just as worrisome, many voters seem to have scaled down their expectations of their leaders, according to Mindanao analysts. No public demand for good roads, more schools, better health care, more jobs; nor is there public rage over the severe lack of these services. The voters, analysts say, have just a few simple wishes of their leaders — don’t grab or buy off our land, leave us in peace, don’t harass, torture, or kill.

Read the PCIJ’s report on “The Clan Politics of Maguindanao” here:

Part 2: Maguindanao’s misery: Absentee officials, absence of rage, poverty

Sidebar 2: Cash for cops and soldiers

Maguindanao was spun off from the greater Cotabato empire province in 1973, the first governor, Simeon Datumanong, held office in Limpongo, in what is now Datu Hoffer town.

His successor, Zacaria Candao, held office on PC Hill in Cotabato City before resigning in 1977.

The replacement governor, Datu Sanggacala Baraguir of Sultan Kudarat town, naturally wanted the capitol in his bailiwick, and had a new capitol built in Sultan Kudarat.

The fourth governor, Sandiale Sambolawan, returned the provincial government to Shariff Aguak.

Then Datu Andal Salibo Ampatuan Sr. was elected governor in May 2001. He built a grand columned capitol almost right beside the municipal hall of Shariff Aguak, where he used to hold office as mayor.

A few years later, Andal Sr. would build a new and even more opulent provincial capitol, complete with a driveway that rivals a small EDSA flyover and a private toilet that houses a Jacuzzi, a stone’s throw away from the old capitol, on land that is rumored to be his own.

After the 2010 elections, Esmael Mangudadatu, the current governor who succeeded Andal Sr., moved the provincial capitol to his hometown of Buluan, accessible from Maguindanao only if one passes through Sultan Kudarat province first.

At first, Mangudadatu referred to the new capitol as the Satellite Office of the Provincial Government. Later, to avoid complications and questions, he renamed the place as the Maguindanao Peace Center.