US prosecutors charge Smartmatic in $1M PH bribery case
Federal prosecutors have charged voting technology firm Smartmatic with money laundering and other crimes arising from more than $1 million in bribes that several executives allegedly paid to election officials in the Philippines.
The payments, between 2015 and 2018, were made to obtain a contract with the Philippine government to help run the 2016 presidential election and secure the timely payment for its work, according to a superseding indictment filed Thursday in a Florida federal court.
Three former executives of Smartmatic, including co-founder Roger Piñate, were previously charged in 2024. At the time South Florida-based Smartmatic was not named as a defendant. Piñate, who no longer works for Smartmatic but remains a shareholder, has pleaded not guilty.
The criminal case is unfolding as Smartmatic is pursuing a $2.7 billion lawsuit accusing Fox News of defamation for airing false claims that the company helped rig the 2020 US presidential election in which Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump.
‘Politically influenced’
Smartmatic, in a statement, denied the allegations and said it believed the US Attorney’s Office in Miami had been misled and politically influenced by unnamed powerful interests.
“This is again, targeted, political, and unjust,” the company said. “Smartmatic will continue to stand by its people and principles. We will not be intimidated by those pulling the strings of power.”
As part of the criminal case, prosecutors in August sought the court’s permission to introduce evidence they argue shows that revenue from a $300 million contract with Los Angeles County to help modernize its voting systems was diverted to a ” slush fund” controlled by Piñate through the use of overseas shell companies, fake invoices and other means.
They also accused Piñate of secretly bribing Venezuela’s longtime election chief by giving her a luxury home with a pool in Caracas. Prosecutors said the home was transferred to the election chief in an attempt to repair relations following Smartmatic’s abrupt exit from Venezuela in 2017, when it accused President Nicolas Maduro ‘s government of manipulating tallied results in elections for a rubber-stamping constituent assembly.
A hearing on the purported evidence tied to Los Angeles and Venezuela will be held next month. However, none of the accusations are mentioned in the superseding indictment signed by Jason Reding Quinones, the new Trump-appointed US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida.
Philippine case
The technology firm’s case involving Philippine officials stemmed from a $199-million contract to supply 94,000 voting machines for the 2016 presidential election.
Andres “Andy” Bautista, the chair of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) at the time and who awarded the contract, was indicted in August last year by a Florida federal grand jury for allegedly taking bribes from Smartmatic. Bautista headed the Comelec from 2015 to 2017.
He has denied any wrongdoing, writing on X (formerly Twitter) that he “did not ask for nor receive any bribe money from Smartmatic or any other entity.”
A day after Bautista’s indictment in the United States, the Comelec launched a parallel investigation of the multimillion-peso bribery case. It also banned Smartmatic in 2023 from bidding on election contracts, a decision that was overturned by the Supreme Court in April 2024.
The charges against Bautista may have been triggered by allegations against him by his estranged wife, Patricia Paz Bautista, who submitted to the National Bureau of Investigation in August 2017 an affidavit, saying that he might have amassed nearly P1 billion in ill-gotten wealth, including P329 million in accounts at Luzon Development Bank.
Bautista repeatedly denied his wife’s allegations and filed multiple cases against her, such as grave coercion, qualified theft and robbery, and extortion.
The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) subsequently initiated a probe into Bautista’s supposed ill-gotten wealth. The US DHS filed a criminal complaint against Bautista for allegedly receiving bribes from Smartmatic in September 2023.
Imminent collapse
Smartmatic was established more than two decades ago by a group of Venezuelans who found early success running elections while the late Hugo Chavez, a devotee of electronic voting, was in power. The company later expanded globally, providing voting machines and other technology to help carry out elections in 25 countries, from Argentina to Zambia.
It has said its business tanked after Fox News gave Trump’s lawyers a platform to paint the company as part of a conspiracy to steal the 2020 election.
Fox said it was legitimately reporting on newsworthy events but eventually aired a piece refuting the allegations after Smartmatic’s lawyers complained. Nonetheless, it has aggressively defended itself against the defamation lawsuit in New York, arguing that the company was facing imminent collapse over its own internal misconduct, not due to any negative coverage.
Sources: Inquirer Archives, Associated Press
