How a Corruption-Sanctioned Company Got a $480M Contract to Build Chile's National ID System — And Broke It

In December 2024, Chile's Registro Civil rolled out a brand new national identity system. It crashed on day one. The system behind every Chilean's cédula de identidad and passport went down nationwide — biometric capture failed, payments broke, documents wouldn't activate, and data errors appeared in identity records. The company responsible? IDEMIA — a French firm built from the merger of two companies with documented corruption histories, owned by American private equity, and already planning its exit before the ink on Chile's contract was dry. The Backstory: A Company Born from Corruption IDEMIA doesn't exist in a vacuum. It was created in 2017 from the merger of: Oberthur Technologies — debarred by the World Bank for 2.5 years for bribing officials in Bangladesh to win a national ID contract Safran Identity & Security (Morpho) — fined €500,000 by a French court for bribing Nigerian officials for a €170M ID card contract The merger was orchestrated by Advent International , a Boston