Electronic voting company claims compensation of USD 1,500 million from Venezuela

A multinational provider of electronic voting systems claims some 1,500 million dollars from Venezuela for “a fraud” in 2017 and the expropriation of assets, the Ibero-American Arbitration Center (CIAR) reported on Tuesday.

The arbitration demand is produced by the votes of July 30, 2017 for the National Constituent Assembly, a body that took over the powers of Parliament when it was controlled by the opposition. The Smartmatic company, which provided the technology to carry out these elections, accused the Venezuelan electoral authorities of “manipulating” the results to inflate participation in the midst of high abstention, an accusation that they denied.

“The British multinational SGO Corporation Limited, of which Smartmatic is a part, has filed an investment arbitration claim against Venezuela (…) in relation to electoral fraud” and “assets expropriated from the company,” according to a published note. through the website of the CIAR magazine, based in Madrid.

A Smartmatic executive said in August 2017 that the official report of the National Electoral Council (CNE) of 8.1 million voters, out of 19.4 million called, would have been “manipulated”, causing a variation that could exceed one million. votes.

Founded by Venezuelans in the late 1990s and part of SGO Corporation Limited since 2014, the company later denounced the expropriation of assets that would have been used by another electoral technology provider in Venezuela since then, Argentina’s ExCle.

In its request for arbitration, SGO maintains that Venezuela undertook a “campaign of persecution” against that company that included “harassment” and “threats” against employees to “force Smartmatic to endorse and certify false electoral results and inaccurate participation volumes.”

It also ensures that there was “retaliation through the deliberate and arbitrary failure to comply with a series of contractual payments.”

Likewise, the transnational highlights “the expropriation” of Smartmatic’s “tangible and intangible” assets to “benefit another foreign company.”

Smartmatic worked on elections in the South American country between 2004 and 2017.

The questioning of the votes in Venezuela reached its zenith with the ignorance on the part of a sector of the opposition and more than fifty countries, including the United States, of the re-election of the socialist president Nicolás Maduro in 2018.

Source: Elcomercio

Ronald Payne

I, Ronald Payne, am a journalist and author who dedicated his life to telling the stories that need to be said. I have over 7 years of experience as a reporter and editor, covering everything from politics to business to crime.