Smartmatic or SmartMagic, as I prefer to refer to the company, has been in the Philippines since 2010 being the service provider for the Comelec’s automated election system. It hasn’t been spared from controversy from the beginning as certain quarters and individuals have been questioning the integrity of its system. In fact, there have been doubts cast on the election results since the 2010 cycle when it was first deployed and resulted in Noynoy Aquino winning the Presidency.
The most serious controversy it has been involved in is the 2016 Vice-Presidential race. Exit polls had Ferdinand Marcos Jr. winning over Maria Leonor Robredo. Marcos was leading in the early count but overnight, Robredo managed to wrest the lead and emerged the winner by the thinnest of margins.
This is not the first time Smartmatic has been involved in controversy. It began as early as 2010 when its US subsidiary, Dominion Voting Systems, was the object of questions given the close race between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George Bush. While Smartmatic and Dominion continue to distance itself from each other, an in-depth article in Vanity Fair on the 2000 election detailed the link between the two. This was the time when journalism was still at its finest unlike now when journalists are partial to one side or the other.
Dan Steinbock writes in his Manila Times column.
The debacle about Comelec’s data was soon linked with Andres “Andy” Bautista, a constitutional legal expert, who was appointed Comelec chairman in 2015 by the late president Benigno Aquino 3rd. In 2010-2015, Bautista had served as Aquino’s chairman of the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG), whose primary mandate had been to recover “ill-gotten wealth” accumulated by Bongbong Marcos’ father, Ferdinand Marcos.
Yet, the PCGG itself has been implicated in several corruption scandals. One of these involves its chairman Bautista. The story goes back to 2017, when his estranged wife Patricia Paz Bautista released information on his unexplained wealth.
Andy and Patricia Bautista
Following his wife’s disclosures, Bautista announced he would resign as Comelec chairman hoping to get out in time. But the House of Representatives voted to impeach him. Shunning the House and the Senate committee subpoena, Bautista “disappeared.” In early 2018, he surfaced in the US claiming he could not travel, due to ill health.
Documents presented by his wife to the National Bureau of Investigation indicated that her husband had a boxful of bank books and documents for undeclared wealth worth P1 billion, or $20 million.
In May 2021, the Court of Appeals affirmed the findings of the National Privacy Commission that Bautista had violated the Data Privacy Act in the April 2016 data breach, just a month before the elections. The breach placed the personal information of millions of Filipino voters at risk.
In 2016, when the Pandora Papers exposed an alleged shadow financial system for the world’s richest, it also featured Bautista and his Baumann Enterprises Ltd., registered in the British Virgin Islands in 2010, the same year when Aquino made him the chairman of the PCGG to fight corruption. The offshore company was reincorporated in 2017, when Bautista got in hot water. It was not declared in his official Statement of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth.
When Bautista was officially investigating Marcos’ ill-gotten wealth, he was unofficially accumulating his own ill-gotten wealth.
Smartmatic’s technology was developed by Venezuelan information technology professionals. It was actually part of the effort to unseat the Marxist Hugo Cesar Chavez from the Presidency.
Over two decades ago, three engineers, led by Antonio Mugica, began to develop a new election technology in Venezuela. After the controversial 2000 US election, they saw an opportunity. With funds from private investors, they incorporated in Delaware in 2000. One of the investors was Jorge Massa Dustou, Venezuela’s richest man married to the sister of Gustavo Cisneros, a billionaire and Dustou’s former boss. Reportedly, Cisneros bankrolled the failed 2002 Venezuelan coup d’état attempt against Hugo Chávez.
Antonio and Pedro Mugica
When Mugica’s company got funds from the Chavez government, the US began to investigate Smartmatic’s links to the Venezuelan government. And so, the software contractor quickly moved its headquarters to London in 2012. Two years later, in a murky reorganization, CEO Mugica and British Lord Mark Malloch-Brown launched SGO Corp. Ltd. The holding company’s key asset was Smartmatic.
Lord Mark Malloch Brown
Malloch Brown’s Philippine ties stem from the mid-1980s when the former Economist journalist became the lead international partner at the Sawyer-Miller Group, presidential hopeful Corazon Aquino’s PR agency. After a poll controversy, Cory Aquino won, but tightly, and Malloch Brown formed a close relationship with the thankful family dynasty. Cooperation was re-ignited ahead of the 2010 elections, when Benigno S. Aquino 3rd became the first Philippine president whose votes were counted by Smartmatic despite persistent allegations about systemic vulnerabilities.
In July 2015, Malloch Brown returned to the Philippines. Subsequently, Comelec’s Bautista awarded Smartmatic contracts at a total of P2.6 billion in the 2016 election.
But Smartmatic was a small stepping stone for Malloch Brown’s big ambitions.
In 2002, Malloch Brown suggested that the UN and Soros’ Open Society work together to fund humanitarian functions, despite associated moral hazards. In exchange, Soros’ Quantum Fund in 2007 appointed Malloch Brown as VP and vice chairman of the Open Society. Yet, the Brit had no prior investment experience. Afterwards, he became chairman of the US-based FTI Consulting, one of the largest financial consulting firms, whose restructuring business made fortunes from the 2008 Great Recession.
George Soros
When Malloch Brown stepped down as chairman of SGO in December 2020, he was made the president of Soros’ Open Society Foundation. As Smartmatic’s chairman, he was succeeded by Peter Vance Neffenger, a US Coast Guard admiral and President Barack Obama’s head of transportation security and a member of Biden’s transition team.
Peter Neffenger
Trained in Harvard and the US Naval War College, Neffenger was seen as the right man to protect elections worldwide (and to sell Smartmatic to skeptical Americans).
Smartmatic’s origins are overshadowed by the election software contractor’s odd associations and long trail of controversies, moral hazards, conflicts of interest and unexplainable fortunes in the name of “good governance.”
Perhaps sometimes those who speak loudest for “public interest, freedom and democracy” are but façades for private interests and oligarchies derailing the very democracy they purport to serve.
As you can see, the links between liberals in the Philippines and liberals abroad are clearly defined. Soros is largely credited with initiating regime-change in Eastern European countries deemed hostile to the US. His Open Society Foundation funds a global network of news organizations promoting liberal ideology which is work he shares with Pierre Omidyar and his Omidyar Network.
Since Duterte’s ascent to the Presidency in 2016, there has been a concerted effort, both here and abroad, to tarnish the image of the Philippines and initiate his ouster. Duterte not only has to contend with the opposition and the anti-Duterte oligarchs in the country, but also the vast global network of Soros, Omidyar and Malloch Brown.
SmartMagic continues as the Comelec’s service provider for automated elections despite the controversies it has been involved in. You have to wonder why this is so. One only has to take into account the recent columns of Gen. Antonio Parlade and Mauro Gia Samonte, pertaining to the Comelec Mafia.
You have to wonder, who is really the individual or the group pulling the strings behind-the-scenes at the Comelec?
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