(Tony Sifert, Headline USA) The Cybercrime Division of the Philippine National Bureau of Investigation has raided the house of an employee of an electronic voting systems company with alleged ties to oligarch George Soros, according to a report in the Philippine Star.
The NBI raided the house of Ricardo Argana in connection with its investigation of a data leak at Smartmatic, Inc., whose former chairman, Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, is the current president of Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
In March, Philippine Senatar Imee Marcos claimed that a “security breach” had occurred at Smartmatic that resulted in a “wide array” of personal voter data being posted to Facebook, and suggested that the leak could affect election results in the country.
“We don’t know, but the potential for very serious security breach is now there because it appears Smartmatic has all these contractual employees who have access to very confidential data, locations, and other facilities,” Marcos told CNN Philippines.
A Smartmatic spokesman denied the report, but GMA later reported that the NBI had arrested a Smartmatic employee said to have been involved in the breach.
“We confirm that NBI conducted an operation last Sunday morning in the premises of Ricardo Argana in San Pedro, Laguna, former Smartmatic employee,” NBI spokesperson Ferdinand Lavin told the Inquirer.
According to a 2016 report in The Daily Caller, the U.K.-based Smartmatic provided voting technology in 16 states in the years before the 2016 election, including more than 50,000 voting and counting machines.
Smartmatic has disputed both the claim that the company is related to Soros and the claim that its technology was used during the 2016 presidential election in the United States.
A Fact Sheet posted on its website claims that “George Soros does not have and has never had any ownership stake in Smartmatic, and that Smartmatic “did not deploy our technology in any U.S. county during 2016 U.S. Presidential elections.”
