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

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 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 arrested last year on a criminal complaint from Miami 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 Taiwanese-manufactured voting machines and related services for the 2016 presidential elections. Before his arrest he denied ever taking money from Smartmatic or any other entity. Nonetheless authorities in the Philippines banned Smartmatic from bidding on a contract to provide election technology for the 2025 election.

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.''

Piñate 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 Piñate'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.

In 2017, Smartmatic broke all ties with Venezuela when it accused President Nicolas Maduro's government of manipulating turnout figures in the country's election for a national constituent assembly. Smartmatic said that the turnout announced by the government was inflated by about 1 million votes.

Piñate, who was also serving as Smartmatic's president, and Jorge Miguel Vasquez were each charged with one count of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which carry a maximum penalty of five years in prison. Both reside in south Florida. Along with Elie Moreno, a dual citizen of Venezuela and Israel who managed Smartmatic's relations with the Philippines, they were also charged with several money laundering charges that carry a maximum penalty of 20 years.

Piñate on his LinkedIn profile touts Smartmatic's corporate motto: ''Protecting election integrity is at the core of what we do.''

Smartmatic sued Fox News for airing false claims that software it developed altered the outcome of the 2020 U.S. 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.

All software accused of altering the outcome of the 2020 U.S. election was developed a decade ago by a U.S. affiliate of Smartmatic.

Fact-checkers at the AP and other outlets have debunked the far-fetched claims. But Trump attorney Sidney Powell nonetheless appeared on Fox News shortly after the election accusing Maduro's former chief of staff of being the ringleader of what she called a ''Cyber Pearl Harbor'' involving Smartmatic.

In the 2020 U.S. election, Smartmatic technology was used in a single district: Los Angeles County, California. It also doesn't have any existing ties to Dominion Voting Systems, a rival that the Trump team has accused of being part of the plot.

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.