Smartmatic head charged with bribing election officials to get contracts in Philippines
A federal grand jury in South Florida on Thursday indicted Roger Piñate, founder and president of the voting-machine company Smartmatic, on charges of committing foreign corruption and money laundering to secure elections contracts in the Philippines.
Piñate, 49, of Boca Raton, and Jorge Miguel Vasquez, 62, of Davie, the company’s former vice president of hardware development, were charged with paying $1 million in bribes to the former chairman of the Philippines’ Commission on Elections, Juan Andres Donato Bautista, 60.
Both Piñate and Vasquez are expected to have their first appearances in Miami federal court on Monday.
“These bribes were allegedly paid to obtain and retain business related to providing voting machines and election services for the 2016 Philippine elections and to secure payments on the contracts, including the release of value added tax payments,” the U.S. Justice Department said in a news release.
Court records, including a Homeland Security Investigations criminal complaint, indicate that Smartmatic’s contracts with the Philippines were worth $199 million for providing voting machines and other services for the May 2016 election for president, vice president and other official positions.
Officials said the alleged co-conspirators financed the bribes by over-billing the cost per voting machine for the elections. To conceal the operation, the co-conspirators used coded language in referring to a slush fund that was used to make the illicit payments, and they created fraudulent contracts and sham loan agreements to justify the transfers, the Justice Department said, citing an indictment.
The co-conspirators then allegedly laundered bribery payments through bank accounts located in Asia, Europe, and the United States, including in the Southern District of Florida, according to the indictment.
Piñate, Vasquez, Bautista and Elie Moreno, 44, a dual citizen of Venezuela and Israel who oversaw Smartmatic’s contracts in the Philippines, are each charged with one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering and three counts of international laundering of monetary instruments.
Piñate, Vasquez, Bautista and Moreno each face a maximum penalty of 20 years of convicted of those charges.
If convicted, Piñate and Vasquez each also face a maximum penalty of five years in prison for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and conspiracy to violate the FCPA counts.
The federal probe in South Florida was launched after Bautista’s wife in August 2017 informed the Philippine National Bureau of lnvestigation that her husband had “large amounts of unexplained wealth,” according to the HSI criminal complaint filed last year. She informed NBl’s Anti-Fraud Division that her husband had approximately one billion Philippine Pesos, or approximately $20 million of ill-gotten wealth.’‘
At the time, the couple was going through a divorce.
Piñate and two other Venezuelans, Antonio Mugica and Alfredo José Anzola, founded Smartmatic in 2000, and gained notoriety after the company was chosen by Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez to replace the country’s voting machines in 2004. The company grew by acquiring the much larger Sequoia Voting Systems in 2006, though the company later announced that it had divested its stake in that company.
A Smartmatic spokesman said in a statement that two of the company’s executives, including Piñate, have been placed on a leave of absence, though he noted that “our accused employees remain innocent until proven guilty.”
“No voter fraud has been alleged, and Smartmatic is not indicted,” the spokesman said. “Still, voters worldwide must be assured that the elections they participate in are conducted with the utmost integrity and transparency.”
Smartmatic became a household name after false claims were made about the company being involved in vote rigging during the U.S. presidential election in 2020. Smartmatic filed a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News in 2021. The case is expected to go to trial in New York next year. A similar defamation case against the conservative network Newsmax is scheduled to go to trial in Delaware in September.
This story was originally published August 8, 2024 at 6:59 PM.
