Hu.go.Colombia?

“Would you buy a used car from this man?”

That was the question asked of many Americans when Richard Nixon ran for President of the US. Today, the question being asked of the Filipino electorate is, would you trust the outcome of the elections to a company long suspected of having ties or influencing the election of Hugo Chavez as President for life in Venezuela?

My guest certainly got my attention since it was not so long ago that Hugo Chavez, the left leaning President of Venezuela, decided he did not want to step down from power. A referendum took place, courts opposed his term extension, but eventually he got “elected” as President again.

In relation to the Philippines, we have a somewhat similar scenario where someone or some people seem to enjoy their stay in office and want to extend this in one form or another.

A European businessman asked me the same question as the topic of the “Smartmatic investigations” came up. Apparently he had read up on the company and suggested that I surf the web to learn more about this seemingly docile company that fits the phrase “a wolf in sheep’s clothing”.

When I punched in Hugo Chavez and Smartmatic, what I found was a river of articles that made Smartmatic look more like a corporate setup for espionage, invisibility and non-accountability.

In Chicago, the most serious suspicions were about an international conspiracy to influence the US elections, as well as illegal entry of Venezuelan technicians into the US through the US affiliate of Smartmatic.

To begin with, various attempts of researchers to trace or track the company profile, ownership and personnel structure of Smartmatic would take you through at least four country/locations: Venezuela, Curacao, Holland and the United States. In the United States, the paper trail went through Florida and Delaware. An attempt to check documentation and relationships always led to a dead end.

When the company started they were a software group with no money until the Venezuelan government pumped in a reported $200,000. In Amsterdam, documents would state that the locally registered business unit was in the “buy and sell” business. In essence they are an evolved IT group that concentrated on electoral requirements, used their Venezuelan connection for funding and to establish a track record in the field of automated counting of ballots. They ultimately went global but failed to clean up their kinks or their tracks.

Corporately, the name Smartmatic always evolved into a different group or set themselves up to look or sound like a joint venture when contracting business. The “mother” name would be linked to a local name such as Sequoia etc. They also practiced “farming out” or sub-contracting parcels of their total contract.

They often kept the software and specialized equipment in their control and would farm out the needed servers or monitors or screens to a smaller unit or company. This layering was apparently useful when the “blame game started”.

What is alarming for the Philippines is that all the reports culled from the web indicate that in a contract for the state of Illinois or the City of Chicago, Smartmatic took three weeks to deliver the election results for 25 precincts out of a total of 65 precincts.

Based on the number of “counting machines” around 40 percent of the equipment failed to operate. Reports claim that the same problems plagued “Smartmatic” in their previous engagements in Venezuela. However, this never became a serious problem since the Venezuelan “Government” had investments in the company.

The reason why guys like Senator Francis Escudero may be banging at them to know who are the Filipino partners is because even in the US, their point man or CEO could not immediately provide the same information at a similar investigation. The poor guy did not even have intimate knowledge of how many people worked for the company in the US and abroad.

In essence the Smartmatic guys who were fed to the lions are nothing more than “contracted employees or managers”. They were hirelings who had limited exposure or accountability since the mother unit was an offshore company made of paper or a bunch of Venezuelan businessmen backed by a highly controversial politician.

Does Escudero fear that the scenario that played out in Venezuela would be happening in the Philippines? The government buying 28 percent share in Smartmatic Philippines and then someone becomes President for life!

According to reports, the COMELEC will push through with the signing of the contract with Smartmatic today, June 26.

Giving COMELEC the benefit of the doubt, I presume that they are simply being “ministerial” in a standard bidding process. They needed equipment, they held a bidding and someone qualified so they sign a contract.

Is it that simple?

Do the Comelec Bids and awards committee members believe that it’s all in a day’s work and that they can rely on the defense that they were simply doing their job? Given all the red flags, and the potentially high risk of failure on the part of Smartmatic to deliver, as well as the bigger risk of a failure of elections, this is no ordinary walk in the park.

Perhaps, if it’s not too late, we ought to ask the Smartmatic representative about cancelled contracts and why? Who and how long will they train their “operators”, and what happens if the final count takes as long as the manual count, will we still pay?

What sort of bond, assurance, hardware directly owned by Smartmatic can we hold on to if they fail in their mission and decide to go back to their Uncle Hugo? Remember such contracts require advance deposits or payments as you go along. Often, we paid for 90 percent of the project before we even got any results.

And if in case things fail, will we have anything left of value or will we have Korean made equipment supplied through sub-contracts just like the useless counting machines that the Comelec has in storage?

Go ahead educate yourself….Google Smartmatic.–Cito Beltran, Philippine Star