The United States is sanctioning a Venezuelan tech company for its involvement in the Maduro regime’s allegedly fraudulent elections earlier this month. The Treasury Department is also targeting two individuals for working on behalf of the company.
A biometric technology company is said to have known about the regime’s efforts to rig the election and helped them do that.
The United States accuses the company of having “millions of dollars of contracts with the illegitimate Maduro regime” to provide “electoral hardware and software” to the regime’s allied government. They are also said to have purchased “thousands of voting machines from China,” using the Russian financial system to route payments. And they allegedly shipped the voting machines through Iran by using “rogue airlines.”
These claims echo affidavits and testimony alleging that dating back to Hugo Chavez, Venezuela has been using fraudulent means to make sure elections would keep Chavez, and now Nicolás Maduro, in power.
Phil Waldron, a cybersecurity expert, said: “I personally debriefed the son of a personal intelligence officer who had first-hand knowledge speaking with a few of Hugo Chavez’s family members, that in the Maduro election when the populist uprising threatened Venezuela’s totalitarian leadership, that Hugo Chavez’s family members said that, ‘Don’t worry, it’s guaranteed,’ that their father invested the money to build the SGO voting machines system.”
A statement from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says there should be “no doubt that the Dec. 6 legislative elections were fraudulent and do not reflect the will of the Venezuelan people” and urged “all countries committed to democracy to condemn the fraudulent Dec. 6 elections and the illegitimate regime’s continuing efforts to destroy democracy in Venezuela.”
