Co-founder of Smartmatic voting machine company charged with paying bribes for Philippine contracts
A federal indictment has charged three current and former executives of Smartmatic in a scheme to pay more than $1 million in bribes to put its voting machines in the Philippines, a setback for a company that has been feuding with allies of Donald Trum...
MIAMI — A federal indictment has charged three current and former executives of Smartmatic in a scheme to pay more than $1 million in bribes to put its voting machines in the Philippines, a setback for a company that has been feuding with allies of Donald Trump over unsubstantiated claims that it manipulated the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
The Justice Department in a statement Thursday said Smartmatic's Venezuelan-born co-founder Roger Piñate and a colleague at the Boca Raton, Florida-based company 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 its work, the Justice Department said in a statement, which, like the indictment, does not mention Smartmatic by name.
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, Hong Kong, Switzerland, New York and Florida. Nearly $1 million of the illegal payments were used by a family member of Bautista to purchase property in San Francisco.
The investigation of the Smartmatic executives started in 2017, when
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