The failure to disclose campaign contributions falls squarely within the mandate of the poll body and no other office, Commission on Elections Chairman George Erwin Garcia said, drawing a firm line around which questions in the case against Senator Rodante Marcoleta belong to the election regulator.
“Basta ‘yung election offense aspect, ‘yan ay absolutely kay Commission on Elections,” Garcia said.
His remarks answered Marcoleta’s assertion, raised through counsel before the Sandiganbayan’s Third Division, that the entire controversy surrounding a P75-million campaign donation should be heard by the Comelec rather than the anti-graft court. The senator, a lawyer, has argued through his lawyer David Gabriel that the poll body holds “continuing jurisdiction” over the matter because it is tied to the elections, a position relayed during a recent court hearing where his motions to dismiss the case and to hold off his 90-day suspension were taken up, according to the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
Garcia framed the boundaries narrowly. Whatever concerns the election offense component, he said, is a question for the Comelec alone and nobody else. He noted that his office had already wrapped up its handling of that particular issue, adding that its closure does not foreclose other proceedings that may carry their own readings of the law and their own jurisdictional reach.
That distinction has become central as parallel cases move through separate venues. The Comelec en banc voted in March 2026 to terminate its own investigation into the senator’s non-disclosure, concluding there was no basis to pursue an election offense against him. Garcia has explained that Republic Act No. 7166 stripped criminal liability from a candidate’s failure to itemize contributions under Section 109 of the Omnibus Election Code, leaving at most administrative consequences. Donors, however, remain exposed to penalties for not reporting what they give, a gap in treatment he has urged Congress to address.
The plunder complaint that landed before the Sandiganbayan rests on a different footing altogether. Prosecutors from the Office of the Ombudsman anchored that charge on the senator’s statement of assets, liabilities and net worth, contending the P75 million was never reflected there. Garcia has repeatedly stressed that SALN matters lie outside the reach of the Comelec, a boundary he reiterated in maintaining that the poll body’s findings and the Ombudsman’s separate track operate independently of each other.
