In October 2025, Smartmatic was criminally charged with conspiracy to violate the FCPA’s anti-bribery provisions, money laundering conspiracy, and money laundering in connection with an alleged bribery scheme involving the former Chairman of the Commission on Elections of the Philippines. (See here for the prior post).
The allegations involved the same core conduct alleged in a 2024 FCPA enforcement action (still pending) involving two company executives, among others.
This recent post highlighted the DOJ’s response to Smartmatic’s motion to dismiss the indictment on the basis of “vindictive and selective prosecution.”
Prior to filing this motion, Smartmatic filed a motion for a bill of particulars (generally speaking a request for the DOJ to provide more specific information about the criminal charges).
Recently, Smartmatic filed its reply brief which states in summary fashion:
“For the first time in over a decade, the government has charged a corporation with violating the FCPA, and it has done so by relying on mutually exclusive statutes set out in a charging document that is as opaque as it is unsupported. Apparently preferring that SGO head to trial with as little information as possible, the government now opposes SGO’s request for the particulars needed to prepare its defense at trial. Citing the Court’s prior denial of defendant Roger Piñate’s motion for bill of particulars, the government suggests the Court should do the same as to SGO. But SGO is differently situated than an individual defendant; it is a foreign corporate entity that the government has conflictingly alleged to be both a “domestic concern” and a “person other than a domestic concern.”
While the opposition spends considerable time on the government’s ability to allege these conflicting theories, it wholly ignores the import of doing so and the reason SGO requires particulars to avoid surprise at trial. Specifically, without more, SGO is left to guess whether the government intends to prove that SGO was a person other than a domestic concern whose agents violated the FCPA while in the territory of the United States or that SGO was itself a domestic concern. As a corporate entity with countless employees and agents who act for it, SGO must also guess which of those employees or agents the government believes acted with authority when violating the FCPA and how they did so to benefit SGO. The government’s competing theories implicate different evidence, different witnesses, and raise different legal questions that SGO must be permitted to evaluate, challenge, and prepare a defense against well in advance of trial.
The Constitution protects defendants, including corporate defendants like SGO—a going concern with employees who are entirely unconnected to the charges at issue and whose livelihoods would be destroyed as a result of a criminal conviction of their employer—from having to defend against such opaque charges. The government should not be entitled to leave SGO to speculate as to how it can defend itself at trial. SGO’s Motion for Bill of Particulars should therefore be granted in its entirety.”
