Co-founder of Smartmatic voting machine company charged with paying bribes for Philippine contracts

MIAMI (AP) — A federal grand jury in Miami has charged the Venezuelan co-founder of a voting machine company targeted by allies of former President Donald Trump with paying more than $1 million in bribes to officials in the Philippines in exchange for contracts it won overseeing the island nation’s elections nearly a decade ago.

The Justice Department in a statement Thursday said Roger Pinate and a colleague at Boca Raton, Florida-based Smartmatic funneled bribes to the chairman of the Philippines’ electoral commission through a slush fund created by overcharging for the cost of each voting machine it supplied authorities. The payments, between 2015 and 2018, were made to obtain business with the Philippines and secure the timely payment for their work, the Justice Department said.

To hide the corrupt payments to Juan Donato Bautista, the former chairman of the Commission on Elections in the Philippines, the co-conspirators allegedly created a slush fund — codenamed the “Philippines Pot,” according to investigators — and sham loan agreements to justify transfers to bank accounts located in Singapore, Europe and the United States.

The investigation of the Smartmatic executives began in 2017, when the wife of Bautista informed investigators in the Philippines that her husband had obtained $20 million in unexplained wealth, some of it in stacks of cash found at their home.

Bautista was indicted last year in Miami in a criminal complaint that accuses him of taking the bribes in exchange for awarding an unnamed company nearly $200 million in contracts to supply tens of thousands of voting machines and related services for the 2016 presidential elections.

Smartmatic in a statement said it had placed the two employees on leaves of absence, effective immediately.

“No voter fraud has been alleged and Smartmatic is not indicted,” the company said in a statement. “Voters worldwide must be assured that the elections they participate in are conducted with the utmost integrity and transparency.”

Pinate co-founded Smartmatic more than two decades ago and its initial success is partly attributable to major contracts from the government of Hugo Chavez, an early devotee of electronic voting, in Pinate’s native Venezuela. It has since expanded globally and helped carry out elections in 25 countries, from Argentina to Zambia as well as several European countries.

Pinate and Jorge Miguel Vasquez were each charged with one count of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which carried a maximum penalty of five years in prison. Both reside in south Florida. Along with Elie Moreno, a dual citizen of Venezuela and Israel, they were also charged with several money laundering charges that carry a maximum penalty of 20 years.

Smartmatic sued Fox News for airing false claims that software it developed altered the outcome of the 2020 US presidential election. In April, another conservative media outlet, One America News Network, settled with Smartmatic similar allegations for undisclosed terms.

Reportedly funding Smartmatic’s costly defamation suit is LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the indictment against the Smartmatic executives.

Smartmatic has also sued several Trump allies, including his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, but the claims against him are on hold while his bankruptcy case plays out.

Fox News earlier tried unsuccessfully to get dismissed out of the case, which also named hosts Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro and former host Lou Dobbs. An appeals court threw out claims against network parent Fox Corp., but Smartmatic refiled them.

Fox countersued under a New York law against lobbing frivolous litigation to try to silence reporting or commentary on public matters. Smartmatic tried in vain to get those counterclaims tossed out.