Federal prosecutors charge Smartmatic in $1 million foreign bribery case in Miami

Jay Weaver, Miami Herald on Oct 16, 2025

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MIAMI — Smartmatic, a London-based company with roots in Venezuela and a subsidiary in South Florida, was charged Thursday with foreign corruption by conspiring to pay more than $1 million in bribes to a Filipino election official to obtain voting machine contracts in the Philippines, according to an indictment filed in Miami federal court.

The indictment added Smartmatic to the same conspiracy charges filed last year against two of its top executives.

Roger Alejandro Piñate, the Venezuelan-American founder of Smartmatic, which has a subsidiary in Boca Raton, surrendered to authorities in August of last year. He pleaded not guilty to conspiring to commit foreign corruption and money laundering to secure voting-machine contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars from the Philippine government for the 2016 election.

Piñate, 50, of Boca Raton, was granted an $8.5 million bond. He’s no longer president of Smartmatic.

Piñate was charged along with Jorge Miguel Vasquez, 64, the company’s former vice president of hardware development, who also surrendered last year. Vasquez, of Davie, was given a $1 million bond and pleaded not guilty to the same conspiracy charges.

Piñate and Vasquez are accused of paying more than $1 million in bribes to the former chairman of the Philippines’ Commission on Elections, Juan Andres Donato Bautista, 61, who is also named as a defendant in the indictment, between 2015 and 2018.

Per the indictment, Piñate, Vasquez and Smartmatic paid the bribes to secure more than $182 million in contracts with the Philippines to provide voting machines and other services for the May 2016 election for president, vice president and other official positions.

Federal authorities said the two Smartmatic executives, along with the company, financed the bribes by overbilling the cost per voting machine for the election. To conceal the operation, they allegedly used coded language in referring to a slush fund that was used to make the illicit payments, and they created fraudulent contracts and sham loan agreements to justify the transfers.

The co-conspirators then allegedly laundered bribery payments through bank accounts located in Asia, Europe, and the United States, including in the Southern District of Florida, according to the indictment.

In a statement, Smartmatic denied the allegations: “This is again, targeted, political, and unjust,” the company said. “Smartmartic will continue to stand by its people and principles. We will not be intimidated by those pulling the strings of power.”

Smartmatic became a household name after it accused Fox News of airing false claims about the company being involved in vote rigging during the 2020 presidential election in which Democrat Joe Biden defeated Republican Donald Trump. Smartmatic filed a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News in 2021.

Piñate, Vasquez and Smartmatic are each charged with conspiring to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Piñate, Vasquez, Bautista and Elie Moreno, a dual citizen of Venezuela and Israel who oversaw Smartmatic’s contracts in the Philippines, are each charged with one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering and three counts of international laundering of monetary instruments. Smartmatic is also charged with those offenses, according to the indictment.

Piñate, Vasquez, Bautista and Moreno each face a maximum penalty of 20 years if convicted of those charges. If convicted, Piñate and Vasquez each also face a maximum penalty of five years in prison for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and conspiracy to violate it.

The federal probe in South Florida was launched after Bautista’s wife in August 2017 informed the Philippine National Bureau of lnvestigation that her husband had “large amounts of unexplained wealth,” according to a Homeland Security Investigations criminal complaint filed in 2023.

She informed the Bureau’s Anti-Fraud Division that her husband had approximately 1 billion Philippine Pesos, or approximately $20 million of ill-gotten wealth.

They were going through a divorce at the time, according to published reports.

Piñate, alongside Venezuelans Antonio Mugica and Alfredo José Anzola, founded Smartmatic in 2000. The trio gained notoriety after the company was chosen by Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez to replace the country’s voting machines in 2004. The company grew by acquiring the much larger Sequoia Voting Systems in 2006, though the company later announced that it had divested its stake in that company.