EXCLUSIVE by Raïssa Robles

Here’s the RESIBO [proof] that it could only be Rodrigo Duterte who used a British data analytics firm to help get elected President.

Cousins Peter and Pompee personally met Alexander Nix in May 2015, after he delivered a talk at the National Press Club on his company’s new way of running an election campaign.

What do you think they discussed during that meal which did not even include beer as a drink but only ice tea?

And why would the cousins La Viña and Laviña motor all the way to the National Press Club in Manila (which is so out-of-the-way from Makati, Pasig and Bonifacio Global City) just to listen to a foreign guy jaw off about a new way of conducting an election campaign?

Six months after that meal, Duterte had tossed his mayor’s hat into the presidential ring and the cousins had become a central part of his campaign team: Pompee La Viña as the “social media director” and Peter Tiu Laviña as the campaign spokesman.

I know that rabid Duterte supporters have been castigating me for concluding it was Duterte whom the Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL) website had alluded to as their Philippine client. Some have even suggested the mystery client was Mar Roxas. So just to cover all bases, I talked to sources in the Mar Roxas and the Grace Poe campaign.

This one is for you, DDS, in the hope that you will start asking some hard questions.

I gave this story to South China Morning Post (HK), for which I have been writing since 1996.