On Thursday, a former chairman of the Philippines Election Commission was charged by the US federal jury in Florida for allegedly receiving bribes from a firm that delivered voting equipment for the country’s 2016 elections.
Andres “Andy” Bautista, 60, has been charged with one count of conspiracy for committing money laundering and three counts of international money laundering, according to a Justice Department statement.
Three voting machine executives were also charged with participating in a “alleged bribery and money laundering scheme to retain and obtain business related to the 2016 Philippine elections,” stated the indictment.
The Justice Department refused to name the company, but one of the three imposed executives is Roger Alejandro Pinate Martinez, a 49-year-old Venezuelan national and Florida resident who co-founded Smartmatic.
The charges claim that from 2015 to 2018, Pinate, Jorge Miguel Vasquez, 62, and other individuals “caused no less than one million dollars in bribes to be paid” to Bautista.
The Philippines Commission on Elections banned Smartmatic from participating on election contracts last year, however the country’s top court overruled the decision in April.
Bautista, who led the election commission between 2015 to 2017, imparted Smartmatic a $199 million contract to deliver 94,000 voting machines to support the Philippines’ 2016 presidential election, which Rodrigo Duterte, the previous president, won.
He has denied any misconduct, “did not ask for nor receive any bribe money from Smartmatic or any other entity,” he wrote on X.
Smartmatic did not respond immediately, but a spokesperson assured CNN last year that the business “has never won a project through any illegal means” and that the claims in the Bautista lawsuit are “not related to Smartmatic election security or integrity.”
Smartmatic has launched charges suing Fox News and former Trump associates, particularly Rudy Giuliani, alleging false assertions that its equipment were used to sway the 2020 US election results.
Photo Courtesy: Rappler