Category: Money Politics

The 33 candidates for senator: Can they explain their wealth?

mcmangahas Leave a comment

ARE THEY RICH, or are they poor? Were they born to wealth, or did they make money on their own labors? Did they bare all the facts of their assets, or mask the important details? What money and which donors make up their power base?

Can the 33 candidates for senator explain their wealth?

As the nation prepares to vote tomorrow, May 13, 2013, the baseline data on the wealth of the candidates should be clear at the outset to all the voters. This way, once the lucky ones get into office, the people could discern the rise or fall in their personal fortunes. In short, a status quo ante record.

Our latest offering, The Wealth of the 33 Candidates for Senator, is a four-part story on the business interests and financial connections of the candidates for senator.

For this report, the PCIJ reviewed all the relevant public records (Statement of Assets, Liabilities, and Net Worth or SALNs, election spending reports, and reports on use and disbursement of pork barrel funds) of the candidates with tenure in public office.

The PCIJ also conducted a reverse search of registry records at the Securities and Exchange Commission to check in which corporate entities all 33 candidates have significant or controlling interest.

Authored by PCIJ Research Director Karol Ilagan and PCIJ Researcher-Writer Rowena Caronan, this report consists of four parts:

* The re-electionist senators, or those seeking a second term of office.

* The members of the House of Representatives who are now aspiring to sit in the Senate.

* The former senators who want to return to the Senate.

* The new, and not-so-new, candidates who want to be senators, even as many of them have no significant record of public service as yet.

You may read the PCIJ’s report in MoneyPolitics Online:

* THE RE-ELECTIONIST SENATORS:
SALNS bare some, mask other details
* Sidebar:
Wealth + donors + clans = power base

THE HOUSE’S WANNA-BE SENATORS:
* Propped by rich clans, big donors
* Sidebar:
Sons & daughters

* THE WANNA-BE SENATORS AGAIN:
No paupers despite break from politics

* The WANNA-BE SENATORS, TOO:
Family wealth, spouses’ assets boost a few newbies

The individual profiles and datasets on the 33 candidates, by their SALNs, election spending reports, and corporate records from the SEC, may be viewed on MoneyPolitics Online and the PCIJ portal.

MoneyPolitics is about ‘making sense of the truth’

Ed Lingao Leave a comment

The following is feedback sent by Ariel Sebellino, Executive Director of the Philippine Press Institute (PPI), the national association of newspapers in the country, following the launch of the MoneyPolitics website by the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) last April 26. The MoneyPolitics site aggregates the documents and databases collected by the PCIJ over the last 24 years on public finance records, statements of assets liabilities and net worth, election spending and donation reports, civil works contracts, and socio-economic statistics in the Philippines. The MoneyPolitics website may be accessed here.

IT WAS SO EASY looking at it. In fact navigating through it is a no-brainer. At face value, it comes across as another investigation and scrutiny of the monies of the powers-that-be — or the lingering and pervasive corruption in Philippine politics — in numbers and innumerable data.

I, for one, am amazed with how everything was put together seamlessly by the PCIJ to bring to the fore its most ambitious project to date — MoneyPolitics Online. Culling voluminous documents from way back and converting them into data sheets through scraping and scripting, details of otherwise hard-to-understand SALNs are churned out for easy reading and comprehension.

A product of tedious and committed effort to say the least, MoneyPolitics delves into the realm and dynamics of governance and spending. Take for example the pork shares of the Representatives. Data are presented to show how these were spent and what kinds of projects were funded. Without prejudice, it enables the reader to make an insightful conclusion on how worthless some expenditures were and question how their constituents benefitted from them.

For journalists and and media practitioners in general, it is a dependable reference to reinforce writing (not limited to investigative journalism) that is wanting in substantive numerical data to essentially illustrate, say the correlation between how an elected government official governs and how the people’s taxes are utilized truthfully.

During its initial presentation by the PCIJ, I asked about other data that may not have been included because it seemed to me every bit of information about local and national governance is already there. According to the people behind it, “it is a work in progress”.

At the end of the day, it is teaching me. It gives me the tool to understand how much of governance and public service have something to do with transparency and accountability — and making sense of the truth that should allow me to make informed decisions for a better quality of life.

Where do they stand? Senate candidates on campaign finance

Ed Lingao Leave a comment


Money and Politics in the 2013 Elections

CAMPAIGN FINANCE HAS ALWAYS been a ticklish subject for many, one often avoided by many a candidate and a voter. And why not? Many complain that they would rather avoid dealing with numbers; politics is complicated enough without having to do math as well.

Yet campaign finance has become one of the leading issues of the 2010 and 2013 elections, as the public and the media learn to slowly look beyond the rhetoric and peek at the numbers. How much are candidates willing to spend to bag a position, and where do they get their funding? Where do they stand on issues like the pork barrel.

Do you know where the senatorial candidates stand on the issue of campaign finance? In this series of brief interviews done by PCIJ’s research section with many of the senatorial candidates, we look at some of the basic issues of campaign finance and what we can expect from these senatorial hopefuls if they do get elected into the upper chamber.


Baldomero Falcone


Christian Seneres


Eddie Villanueva


Greco Belgica


Marwil Llasos


Ramon Montano


Ricardo Penson


Rizalito David


Samson Alcantara


Teddy Casino


Bam Aquino


Chiz Escudero


Cynthia Villar


Margarita Cojuangco


Miguel Zubiri


Gringo Honasan


Koko Pimentel


Risa Hontiveros


Grace Poe

Polls may be orderly, peaceful, but vote-buying still a problem

Ed Lingao Leave a comment

MON

AN ELECTORAL REFORM GROUP predicted that Monday’s mid-term elections will likely be relatively orderly and peaceful, but raised concerns that vote-buying and padded voters’ lists remain as persistent problems in Philippine elections.

The Institute on Political and Economic Reforms (IPER) and the Consortium on Electoral Reforms (CER) gave this assessment in a briefing for media groups in the run-up to the May 13, 2013 mid-term elections on Monday.

CER Chairman Ramon Casiple said that all indications point to the orderly conduct of the elections on Monday, with the same precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines that were used in the 2010 elections being used again. Casiple said that while some have raised many concerns over the failure of the Commission on Elections to undertake an independent review of the source code, or the PCOS software, this is not a major issue as the source code had worked well enough in the 2010 elections.

What is important, Casiple says, is that the source code was already certified as working by SysTest Lab, Inc.

However, Casiple expressed concerns that the voters’ list has not been fully purged of multiple or fake registrants. An indication of just how questionable the voters’ list may be is shown by last year’s reregistration of voters in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). In that reregistration, the Comelec trimmed the ARMM voters list by half a million voters, from 1.7 million voters to only 1.2 million voters. The half million cancelled voters were found to be either multiple registrants, or ghost registrants.

Casiple said this is a sign of just how unreliable the current voters’ list is. The last general registration of voters was conducted in 1997, or 16 years ago.

“Yung ganung kalaki na natanggal only confirmed the suspicions sa problema sa ARMM before,” Casiple said. “Pero sa ARMM lang iyun. What about the rest of the country?

(The huge number of cancelled voters in ARMM only confirmed all the suspicions of the problems in ARMM. But that is only in ARMM. What about the rest of the country?)

“The rest of the country still has that old registry still dating back to the 1997 general registration,” he said.

The other persistent problem, Casiple said, is the prevalence of vote-buying. Casiple said that their reports from the field indicate that the average price of a vote is now at P 1,500.

The amount however varies from region to region, also depending on how heated the local contest is. For example, Casiple said that some reports peg the price of a vote at only P500 in Manila, while it could go as high as P2,000 in Pasig City. In parts of Mindanao, the price appears to have skyrocketed, with votes being bought at P7,000 in Lanao and up to P10,000 in Monkayo, a municipality in Compostela Valley which also plays host to the gold-rich area of Mount Diwalwal.

The basics of campaign finance: Sharing another PCIJ video

Ed Lingao Leave a comment

THE PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM is also making available to the general public a video presentation on the basics of campaign finance.

The 19-minute video, based on an interview with Commission on ELections Commissioner Christian Robert Lim, is an easy-to-understand instructional video on the dos and donts of campaign finance, an issue that some perceive to be complex and uninteresting.

The video discusses why the public should be interested in campaign finance, and basic principles on what are allowed and what are not in terms of campaign contributions and expenditures.

Please note that the video would be helpful for everyone, from Comelec employees still grappling with the new emphasis on campaign finance, to citizens and voters who would want to be eagle-eyed in this month’s elections.

Feel free to share the video in your social networking sites.