Cited Laws
accordingly prohibits any candidate or his or her spouse or member of his or her family within the second civil degree of affinity or consanguinity to participate, directly or indirectly , in the distribution thereof. Here, petitioners do not refute that cash assistance payouts did, in fact, take place on two occasions. In other words, monetary social welfare reliefs were distributed to tricycle drivers and senior citizens on different occasions. Hence, the question now is whether Noel, Carmen, and Barizo are liable for participating in said distribution, whether directly or indirectly. In its ordinary meaning, to participate is to take part, to have a part or share in something. [106] To participate directly is to be actively involved or engaged. Meanwhile, to participate indirectly is to be involved or engaged passively, yet the participant's complicity remains unequivocal. Here, apart from the pictures which show their presence in the event, there is no showing of any overt act on the part of Noel, Carmen, and Barizo that would be indicative of their direct participation therein. In fact, under pain of repetition, what has been established is that the program was spearheaded by the LGU through the CSWDO. There was no evidence presented at all, other than the ambiguous messages of gratitude to herein petitioners, that they actively gave, or in any way lent a hand, in the distribution of the cash assistance to the recipients. The foregoing, notwithstanding, as regards the other prohibition in Section 261(v)(2) as to indirect participation in the distribution of any relief or other goods, the Court here finds, and so holds, that there is substantial evidence showing that they nonetheless indirectly participated therein. Firstly, while the facilitation Barizo extended to the program through his text messages do not equate to acts of release, disbursement, or expenditure of public funds, they nonetheless clearly amounted to, at the very least, an indirect participation in the distribution of the cash assistance. Suffice it to state, the text messages sent by Barizo's staff informed the President of TODA, Roderick O. Buban (Buban), about the schedule of the cash assistance payouts on March 28 to 29, 2022 and gave instructions to claim the cash assistance at the City Treasurer's Office should the recipients fail to attend the events. This was attested to by Buban in his affidavit, which Armogila submitted before COMELEC. [107] In his defense, Barizo only proffers a general denial of these text messages and dismisses the affidavits of Buban and his fellow tricycle driver, Leomar Aringo, as being baseless, self-serving, and speculative. The Court notes, however, that these affidavits and text messages are corroborative of the subsequent Facebook post of Barizo, which chronicled the cash assistance payouts on March 28 to 29, 2022. Again, Barizo denies knowledge of said Facebook post, but this denial simply fails to persuade in view of the fact that he a