Sotto says NPC to back Grace for president

The Nationalist People’s Coalition (NPC) is expected to announce by the first week of March the presidential candidate the party would support for the presidency.

Sen. Vicente Sotto III, of the NPC, said yesterday that he expects the party to support Sen. Grace Poe based on his own consultations with fellow members.

“A majority will go for Grace. We’re just waiting for the final or official statement

from either Jun Dy ( Faustino Dy Jr.) or Gigi (Giorgidi) Agabao,” said Sotto, a senatorial candidate of Poe and Sen. Francis Escudero’s Team Galing at Puso.

Sotto told reporters in Cabanatuan City that there would be a party decision on who the NPC will endorse and the plan is to come out with the announcement on the first week of March.

According to Sotto, the NPC leadership is now in the process of collating the reports from its members across the country, but based on what he has seen, a majority of them are for Poe.

Sotto said that the NPC has always allowed its party members to make their own choices on whom to support during the elections.

He said that there is no strict policy to toe the party line when it comes to this issue and that whoever wants to support a candidate other than whom the party has endorsed would just have to inform the leadership.

Based on his assessment, Sotto said that the NPC members who could go for a different candidate would consist of two to three percent of its total membership.

Sotto said that this is the first time that the party had a hard time coming out with an endorsement early and that this had something to do with the relationship between its members and the various candidates running for president.

Poe said that she would welcome any support that the NPC or any other group would offer her.

She said that many of the NPC members are her friends and also close to her late father Fernando Poe Jr.

Poe and her running mate Escudero could not confirm the reports that an ally of President Aquino is recruiting supporters to campaign for Poe, but said that they would always welcome any support from any group or individual.

At a press conference in Cabanatuan City yesterday, Poe said that she does not know former interior undersecretary Rico Puno personally, although she admitted to seeing him in some of her events in the past.

Puno, a close friend of the President, has reportedly been recruiting people to help out in her campaign.