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

MIAMI (AP) — A federal grandy 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 its 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 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 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