Feds charge ex-Miami congressman Rivera anew with breaking income tax laws in Venezuela case

A year after being charged with working as an unofficial agent for the Venezuelan government, former Congressman David Rivera is now accused of failing to report hundreds of thousands of dollars in income — and diverting some of that money through a political campaign account to himself, according to an amended federal indictment.

The new indictment accuses Rivera, a Miami Republican who served in Congress a decade ago, of three tax crimes. It includes submitting a false corporate return for his consulting firm in 2017 and attempting to evade taxes on his personal return the following year.

The charges were added Friday to an original indictment unveiled a year ago that charged Rivera, 58, with acting as an agent for Venezuela without legally registering with the U.S. government for a lobbying job that paid him $20 million before he was fired, according to court records. In 2017, Rivera’s business, Interamerican Consulting, was hired as a lobbyist by a U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company. However, as required by law, he didn’t register as a foreign agent with the Justice Department.

In an unusual turn of events, Rivera has yet to enter a formal plea to the indictment because he and his temporary defense attorneys have been battling federal prosecutors over the freezing of certain real estate properties belonging to him and another defendant that they want to sell to pay for their legal fees. That dispute, which lawyers for Rivera and the other defendant won in a preliminary round this year, is expected to be finally decided before U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles in early 2024.

Rivera’s defense attorneys, Ed Shohat and David Weinstein, questioned the timing of the additional tax charges and vowed to fight them.

“As with the rest of this indictment, Mr. Rivera denies he committed any tax crimes and looks forward to vindicating himself in court,” Shohat told the Miami Herald Monday.

Reached later, Rivera told the Herald: “As with the false [Foreign Agents Registration Act] allegations, these false tax allegations will be similarly disproved and show it all to be a complete politically motivated witch-hunt.”

What led to Rivera’s new indictment?

According to the amended indictment, Rivera’s company, Interamerican Consulting reported revenue of $20 million with total deductions of $15,725,213 — resulting in corporate income of $4,274,787. The deductions on a tax form included unspecified “advertising” expenses, the indictment says, that were really “non-deductible” payments to Rivera for “his personal benefit” in 2017.

Among them: three principal payments on Rivera’s home equity line of credit on his residence in Doral; two contributions to his campaign account at SunTrust Bank for a state representative seat in the 2018 general election; and a contribution to his political action committee, Florida First, for “marketing” expenses.

In addition, the indictment accuses Rivera of instructing an unnamed law firm that he had hired to represent Interamerican Consulting to transfer most of a $1 million retainer fee to Rivera’s campaign account at SunTrust in 2018. Interamerican had listed the $1 million as a deduction on its tax return for the previous year, the indictment says.

As part of his scheme, according to the indictment, Rivera filed a “termination report” for his legislative campaign with the Florida Division of Elections that “falsely claimed” he had disbursed about $50,000 in a charitable donation to a Miami-area high school and $336,821 in a “loan repayment” to himself — leaving his campaign account with no balance.

The indictment claims, however, that Rivera’s campaign account still had a balance of $1,355,451 on Sept. 30, 2018.

That month, “Rivera used the funds in his campaign account at SunTrust Bank ... to pay for various personal expenses,” the indictment alleges, including $902,792 in legal fees that his consulting company’s law firm had returned to him through that account.

As a result, Rivera and his wife failed to declare the $902,792 on their tax return for 2018, the indictment says. Instead, Rivera reported total taxable income for the couple of $56,689 on their IRS 1040 form, resulting in a total tax “purportedly” due of zero dollars.

The latest tax charges add to an already convoluted case brought against the Republican politician and an associate by Assistant U.S. Attorney Harold Schimkat.

Work for Venezuela’s oil subsidiary

Last December, the original indictment charged Rivera and the associate, Esther Nuhfer, with conspiring to commit offenses against the United States, failing to register as foreign agents as part of their consulting work for Venezuela’s oil subsidiary, PDV USA, and money laundering.

As Venezuela’s economy was crashing in 2017, the country’s state-owned oil company hired Rivera for a costly public relations campaign to prop up the Venezuelan firm in the United States and to prevent U.S. sanctions. In just a few months, Rivera’s business, Interamerican Consulting, collected $20 million from Venezuela’s U.S. subsidiary, PDV USA, but its $50 million contract with the former politician abruptly ended when he was accused of doing little work, according to a lawsuit in New York that was filed before the federal indictment in Miami.

Court documents in both the civil and criminal cases revealed that Rivera diverted more than half of his PDV USA income — $13 million — to three subcontractors in Miami who supposedly provided “international strategic consulting services” for the Venezuelan firm. The three recipients of the proceeds were his Venezuelan lawyer, Raul Gorrin, known as a TV medial mogul in Caracas with political connections; Rivera’s associate, Nuhfer; and a formerly convicted drug trafficker, Hugo Perera. Both Perera and Gorrin owned homes on exclusive Fisher Island.

Gorrin, who is not charged in Rivera’s case, was indicted by a Miami federal grand jury on foreign corruption and money laundering charges in 2018. In court papers, prosecutors describe Gorrin as a “fugitive” from justice.