Ex-COMELEC chief Andres Bautista, Smartmatic execs indicted in US for bribery, money laundering

THE long arm of the law is fast catching up on former Commission on Elections (COMELEC) chairman, Juan Andres Donato Bautista and top officials of automated poll service provider, Smartmatic, after the United States Department of Justice formally indicted them for bribery and money laundering at the Southern District Court of Florida.

And unless a miracle happens, all the accused could spend the rest of their lives in prison for violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), international money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

The official press statement from the Justice Department identified Bautista, 60, and his co-conspirators as, Roger Alejandro Piñate Martinez, 49, a Venezuelan citizen; Jorge Miguel Vasquez, 62, a US citizen; and, Eli Moreno, 40, a dual citizen of Venezuela and Israel.

Piñate is the general manager of Smartmatic while Vasquez is the vice president for external operations. Moreno, for his part is the Smartmatic’s vice president for its Global Services Unit.

The announcement of the indictment of Bautista and the 3 Smartmatic executives comes at a worse time for the company as it faces another scandal involving the creation of bogus offshore accounts that victimized COMELEC chairman George Erwin Garcia, in a bid to force him to resign.

The same day the US Justice Department announced the indictment, Garcia was holding a press conference in Manila where he revealed he is seeking the help of US authorities to also investigate Smartmatic for election interference and money laundering.

The road to perdition… 

Bautista was first appointed by President Benigno Aquino III as chairman of the Presidential Commission on Good Government in August 2010 and was then appointed by Pres. Aquino to the top COMELEC post in April 2015.

Bautista and his confederates’ road to perdition began on August 4, 2017, after Bautista’s wife, Patricia, went public and claimed he has at least P1 billion in ill-gotten wealth mainly from bribes he took from Smartmatic in relation to the holding of the 2016 national elections where then Sen. Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr. lost—controversially—to then Camarines Sur Rep. Leni Robredo.

Marcos not only filed an election protest to contest the result but the reports and allegations of election cheating, vote count tampering and incompetence resulting to the delay in the payment of poll workers, including public school teachers, were so massive that even the 6 commissioners of the COMELEC on June 3, 2016, released a statement accusing Bautista of “failed leadership.”

In December 2016, the National Privacy Commission also recommended the filing of criminal charges against Bautista after a data breach in the COMELEC’s system resulted to the release of personal data of 1.3 million overseas Filipino voters as well as fingerprints of 15.8 million people.

The revelation made by Patricia also resulted to Bautista’s impeachment by Congress on October 11, 2017, just hours after he announced his intention to retire at the end of the year.

Aside from taking bribes, the ‘Pandora Papers’ released in 2021 by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) also disclosed that Bautista is the owner of an offshore account in the British Virgin Island in the name of ‘Baumann Enterprises’ that he never disclosed in his Statement of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth (SALN).

Under mounting pressure, Bautista finally tendered his resignation to Pres. Rodrigo Duterte a week later, on October 23. He then fled to the United States on November 21, to evade his legal woes here and avoid a confrontation not only with his wife but also with the members of the Senate.

The Americans’ turn at the legal spigot

Taking the cue from the revelations of Patricia, the ‘El Dorado Task Force’ of the Homeland Security Investigation (HSI) of the Department of Homeland Security in Miami, Florida, with the assistance from the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS CI), conducted its own probe, especially on the issue of bribery and money laundering.

The press statement added that the Philippines’ Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Office of the Ombudsman “provided substantial assistance” in the investigation.

According to the indictment returned by a federal grand jury in the Southern District of Florida, Smartmatic’s bribery of Bautista to the tune of $1 million happened between 2015, a year before the Philippines’ national elections and 2018, when Bautista has already resigned and living in the United States.

The bribe is for Smartmatic “to obtain and retain business related to providing voting machines and election services for the 2016 Philippine elections and to secure payments on the contracts, including the release of value added tax payments.”

To accomplish their criminal enterprise, the indictment noted that the conspirators created a “slush fund” by “over invoicing” (cost padding) each vote counting machine (VCM) used in the 2016 elections.

“To conceal and disguise the nature and purpose of the corrupt payments, the co-conspirators used coded language to refer to the slush fund and caused the creation of fraudulent contracts and sham loan agreements to justify transfers,” it added.

The accused then laundered the bribe money to Bautista thru various bank accounts in Asia, Europe, and the United States, including the Southern District of Florida.

All the accused were each charged with one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering and three counts of international laundering of monetary instruments. Each count of these violations carried the maximum penalty of 20 years.

Piñate and Vasquez were also separately charged for violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) that carries a penalty of 5 years imprisonment.