In winner-takes-all fashion, not just votes but also funds had flooded the Aquino camp. This is even as a fund-raiser and a senior campaign staff would later say in separate interviews that Aquino had already served notice that he did not want to accept more donations. In Aquino’s mind, says the senior campaign staff, the last-minute bettors were not true believers but simply people angling to cut deals with the emerging election victor.


Aquino’s sisters had a thought to return the excess campaign funds. But the fund-raiser says that led to questions like: Which donor should get money back? How to assign amounts to return? By then, 96 donors, including about a dozen Aquino relatives, had pitched in donations of several thousand pesos to P100 million. The fund-raiser, a big and respected businessman, says he and his colleagues advised Aquino to just turn over the excess donations to a non-profit charity group such as the Ninoy and Cory Aquino Foundation.


In his Statement of Election Contributions and Expenditures (SECE) that he filed with the Commission on Elections (Comelec) within the first deadline of June 9, 2010, Aquino reported that he had raised a total of P440,050,000 in campaign contributions but incurred only P403,119,981.81 in campaign expenditures. This left Aquino P36,930,018.19 or nearly P37 million in excess campaign funds.



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PNoy’s P37-M excess campaign funds: Curious, puzzling details