Short answer. Yes. Article 185 punishes soliciting a gift or promise in exchange for refraining from bidding at a public auction, and also driving bidders away by threats, gifts, promises, or other schemes to lower the price. The penalty is prisión correccional in its minimum period and a percentage-based fine.
What the law says
Any person who shall solicit any gift or promise as a consideration for refraining from taking part in any public auction
Revised Penal Code, Article 185 — Machinations In Public Auctions. Read the full provision →
Machinations in public auctions
Public auctions work fairly only if bidders compete openly, and Article 185 protects that competition by punishing schemes that rig it. It reaches any person who shall solicit any gift or promise as a consideration for refraining from taking part in any public auction, and also any person who tries to make bidders stay away from an auction by threats, gifts, promises, or other artifice, with intent to cause the price of the thing auctioned to drop. The offense is aimed at manipulations designed to suppress genuine bidding and thereby distort the price the auction should produce.
Being paid to stay out of the bidding
The first form of the crime is exactly the situation described: soliciting a gift or a promise in return for agreeing not to take part in a public auction. A would-be bidder who offers to keep out of the bidding in exchange for a payment, or who asks to be paid off for staying away, commits the offense. The vice is that a competitor is being bought out of the contest, so that the remaining bidders face less competition and the property can be won at an artificially low price, to the loss of the seller or the public.
Driving other bidders away
The second form targets efforts to scare or lure other bidders off. A person who attempts to cause bidders to stay away from an auction by threats, gifts, promises, or any other artifice, intending to reduce the price of the thing auctioned, falls within the article. Here the manipulator works on others rather than selling his own absence, but the object is the same: to thin out the competition and depress the auction price. Both forms share the intent to defeat the honest, competitive pricing that a public auction is meant to achieve.
The penalty and its purpose
The offense is punished by prisión correccional in its minimum period, together with a fine ranging from ten to fifty percent of the value of the thing auctioned, so the monetary penalty scales with what was at stake in the manipulated sale. By punishing both being paid to stay out and driving others away, Article 185 protects the integrity of public auctions and the fair prices they are supposed to yield. Anyone tempted to solicit or offer such payoffs should understand that the law treats these auction machinations as a crime.