Unregistered joint venture, Smartmatic is a ghost. The company Smartmatic-TIM has ceased to exist and lost is legal personality after the conclusion of the 2010 elections. It failed to register anew before it offered its services for the 2013 midterm elections, and it has not acquired a new registration to qualify to bid for the 2016 polls. The Citizens for Clean and Credible Elections (C3E) said the joint venture, organized solely for the purpose of offering its services for the national polls more than four years ago, has turned to a ghost corporation but still doing business with the Commission on Elections. Smartmatic is among the bidders for the supply of P2.5 billion worth of additional voting machines for use in the 2016 elections. The ghost that is Smartmatic-TIM has lost its personality to even be considered as a legitimate participant in the bidding being conducted by the Commission on Elections, C3E spokesman Dave Diwa said. Diwa said documents submitted by Smartmatic to the Comelecs Bids and Awards Committee showed that the company was meant to exist only to offer its services for the conduct of the 2010 elections. It failed to register anew before it offered its services for the 2013 midterm elections, and it has not acquired a new registration to qualify to bid for the 2016 polls. As things stand now, no such company as Smartmatic-TIM legally exists due to the absence of a valid registration. Therefore, the Comelec has no reason to consider an offer from a ghost joint venture, Diwa said. C3E on Thursday said Smartmatic was disqualified from providing election-related services in 2013 and remains unqualified to participate in the bidding for 23,000 additional voting machines. “There is therefore sufficient grounds for the Comelec to disqualify Smartmatic from the bidding for 2016 elections,” Diwa said. “Smartmatic should have been disqualified from taking any part in the 2013 elections in the first place,” he added. At the opening of bid documents at the Comelec, Smartmatic admitted that its incorporation papers allowed it only to offer its services to the Comelec in the 2010 national elections. The legally infirm qualification document was uncovered at the opening of the bid documents by the Bids and Awards Committee yesterday. This development reinforced the earlier position of C3E that there are sufficient grounds to blacklist Smartmatic from any bidding of the Comelec. CE3 and other groups advocating for honest elections as well as experts in automated elections technology are calling for the blacklisting of Smartmatic from the roster of possible bidders for the multi-billion project on the refurbishment of old PCOS machines and the purchase of additional units of the said election equipment. Based on the articles of incorporation submitted by Smartmatic, the company said its main objective in registering with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was to only participate in the 2010 national and local elections, Diwa said. Diwa said there were also documents submitted by Smartmatic which were found to be written in foreign language that were not translated into English. The CE3 official also took note of the fact that Smartmatic failed to submit its sworn statement of its on-going projects. Smartmatic attempted to defend itself by saying that it has just amended its articles of incorporation and that such is already being processed at the SEC but C3E said the ‘alibi’ is weak and unacceptable. C3E also slammed Smartmatic for reasoning out that it ran out of time for translation that’s why there were foreign languages in its articles of incorporation. “The fact that C3E admitted that it still need to amend its articles of corporation truly shows that they should not be qualified in any Comelec bidding because the company is just in the process of applying its registration with the SEC,” Diwa said.-- ###
Posted on: Fri, 05 Dec 2014 14:58:23 +0000
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