Mayor Jose Guinto is the incumbent Mayor of the City of Binibini, a first-class city with a total of 300,000 registered voters. He ran for…

The question

Mayor Jose Guinto is the incumbent Mayor of the City of Binibini, a first-class city with a total of 300,000 registered voters. He ran for re-election in the May 2025 elections against his rival Lorenzo Pilak (Pilak). Under Section 13 of Republic Act No. 7166, in relation to the Omnibus Election Code (OEC), the allowable campaign expenditure for a candidate for city mayor is PHP 3.00 per voter for a candidate with a political party, or PHP 5.00 per voter for an independent candidate. Mayor Guinto ran under Partido ng Bano (PNB) making his allowable spending limit PHP 3.00 x 300,000 = PHP 900,000.00. During the campaign period, the following expenditures were made in connection with Mayor Guinto’s re- election campaign: Item 1. Mayor Guinto’s campaign team directly purchased television advertising slots on three local and national television networks, spending a total of PHP 850,000.00, documented by advertising contracts and broadcast logs signed by Mayor Guinto’s authorized representative. Item 2. Mahirap Business Club (MBC), a private business organization composed of Binibini’s prominent businessmen, independently produced and aired a television advertisement praising Mayor Guinto’s infrastructure projects and urging viewers to re-elect him. MBC spent PHP 2 million on the advertisement which aired for several months. MBC’s president stated in a sworn affidavit that MBC produced the advertisement independently, without any request from or coordination with Mayor Guinto’s campaign team, purely as an exercise of the organization’s freedom of expression in support of a candidate they believed in. Item 3. PNB spent PHP 1.5 million on campaign materials prominently bearing Mayor Guinto’s name, photograph, and the words “IBOTO SI MAYOR GUINTO.” The PNB provincial chairman certified that these materials were produced and distributed by the party independently, without request from Mayor Guinto’s personal campaign team. If all three items are counted toward Mayor Guinto’s campaign spending, the total is PHP 4.35 million. However, if only Item 1 (Mayor Guinto’s direct campaign spending) is counted, the total is PHP 850,000.00. Mayor Guinto won the election against Pilak and was proclaimed the winning candidate and took his oath of office as City Mayor of Binibini. Dismayed, Pilak filed a Petition for Disqualification against Mayor Guinto before the COMELEC under Section 68(c) of the OEC for campaign overspending. In his defense, Mayor Guinto argues that the MBC advertisement and the PNB campaign materials should not be counted toward his campaign spending limit because they were made by independent third parties without any request from or coordination with his campaign team, and represented the exercise of their own constitutional right to free expression in favor of a candidate of their choice. He further avers that the law only penalizes the candidate’s spending, not that of independent supporters. He claims that he cannot be held liable for third-party spending that he did not authorize, request, or know about. Is Mayor Guinto correct? Explain.