2014: SGO Said He Would Chair a Group Built on Smartmatic

FACT

Smartmatic vote-counting machine at a COMELEC demo exhibit in SM City Marikina, Philippines, April 2022

Smartmatic vote-counting machine at a COMELEC demo, SM City Marikina, Philippines, April 2022. Photograph by Patrickroque01. CC BY-SA 4.0. A Philippines demo — not a claim that Malloch-Brown owned the machine or stole the 2020 U.S. election.

On 25 November 2014, SGO published a London statement: Antonio Mugica and Lord Mark Malloch-Brown “today announce a new venture, SGO, built on the extraordinary success of Smartmatic, the world’s leading voting technology provider.” Mugica would remain Smartmatic’s CEO. “Lord Malloch-Brown will become chairman.” The statement quotes him: “When I discovered Antonio and his team I saw three extraordinary assets: an elections business that could help restore faith in democracy but which despite being the largest in the world remains too little known…” Those are SGO’s words and the quote SGO attributed to him.

Companies House records the appointment of George Mark Lord Malloch-Brown as a director of SGO CORPORATION LIMITED (company 07477910) on 29 September 2014. A November 2014 filing on the company’s history records a name change from Smartmatic LIMITED. The officer record shows the directorship ended on 4 December 2020. Companies House states that it does not check the accuracy of information filed. A director appointment is not, by itself, a statement of share ownership. This page does not say he owned Smartmatic.

Sources

SGO, Nov. 25, 2014. Mark Malloch-Brown and Antonio Mugica launch SGO. sgo.com

Companies House officer record. Appointed 29 Sep 2014; resigned 4 Dec 2020. find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk

Companies House, SGO CORPORATION LIMITED officers. company 07477910

Companies House filing history (name change from Smartmatic LIMITED, Nov. 2014; AP01 appointment). filing history

Opinion

The following is commentary by this site. It is not a finding of fact and not a legal conclusion.

Compiler take

They put the UN development man on the board of a voting-tech holding company and said the group was built on Smartmatic. That is their press release. Ownership is a different document. We do not have a share register on this page, so we do not invent one.