The voting technology company, Smartmatic was added to a Justice Department indictment that claimed that some of the company’s executives took part in a scheme to bribe an election official in the Philippines.
In August 2024, prosecutors charged Smartmatic’s president and co-founder, and another executive, Jorge Vasquez, Roger Piñate, with breaking the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bans corporate bribery overseas. Mr. Piñate, Mr. Vasquez and Elie Moreno, a former Smartmatic executive, along with the former elections commission chairman, Juan Andres Bautista, were also charged with money-laundering violations.
The defendants are accused of funneling $1 million in bribes, from 2015 to 2018, to the man who led the Philippine elections commission for most of that time in order to obtain contracts.
The superseding charges, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, adds criminal charges of money laundering and foreign bribery against Smartmatic as a company.
A spokesman for Smartmatic said the company categorically denied the allegations.
“This is wrong on the facts and wrong on the law,” he said in a statement. “We will contest the claims, and we are confident we will prevail in court.”
He added, “We believe the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of Florida has been misled and politically affected by powerful interests, despite our extensive cooperation with the government.”
Smartmatic was a little-known company until 2020, when it became the subject of false claims about vote-rigging in the U.S. presidential election. Smartmatic filed a number of defamation suits in response, and settled last year with the right-wing networks Newsmax for $40 million and One America Newsfor an undisclosed amount. A $2.7 billion lawsuit against Fox News is ongoing.
