MIAMI — As Venezuela’s economy was crashing in 2017, the country’s state-owned oil company hired former U.S. Rep. David Rivera for a costly public relations campaign to improve the tarnished image of the Venezuelan firm in the United States.
In just a few months, Rivera’s consulting business collected $20 million from Venezuela’s U.S. subsidiary, PDV USA, but its contract with the former Florida Republican abruptly ended when he was accused of doing little work, according to a lawsuit. Newly filed court documents reveal 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.
One of Rivera’s subcontractors who received millions from his Venezuelan deal is a real estate developer who was convicted in one of South Florida’s biggest drug-trafficking cases, the Miami Herald and el Nuevo Herald have learned from court records. It’s not clear from the records whether Miami developer Hugo Perera and the other recipients of Rivera’s payments ever did any work as part of his consulting firm’s contract with PDV USA.
Venezuela’s U.S. subsidiary only became aware of Rivera’s diversion of payments after it sued his company, Interamerican Consulting, in 2020; it is now battling with Rivera and his firm’s lawyers over obtaining key evidence from the former politician. PDV USA, based in New York, is seeking to recover the $20 million in payments from Rivera’s company in a breach-of-contract suit stemming from their original $50 million agreement signed in 2017. Rivera’s firm has filed a counterclaim seeking full payment of the contract.
Rivera, who never registered as a foreign agent with the U.S. government to do consulting work for the Venezuelan firm, has been under scrutiny in a parallel criminal investigation by federal prosecutors in Miami, according to several sources familiar with the probe. But no one, including Rivera, has been charged in connection with his contract with PDV USA.
Court records in the PDV USA case, filed in New York federal court, show that Rivera diverted the $13 million in income from his consulting contract to a handful of Miami-area companies owned by or linked to the following three people:
—Perera, who is building affordable housing projects in the city’s working-class neighborhoods, according to his company’s website. Currently living on exclusive Fisher Island, Perera pleaded guilty to cocaine trafficking and tax fraud charges in the mid-1990s in a massive drug-smuggling case against the notorious Cali Cartel, according to federal court records. Perera played a supporting role as a distributor for the cartel in South Florida and was sentenced to eight years in prison, court records show. Herald reporters tried to visit Perera at his business address, 141 Sevilla Ave. in Coral Gables, but his company, PG & Associates, no longer operates there.
—Miami-Dade political operative Esther Nuhfer. Over the years, she has provided fundraising, marketing and other services for Rivera’s campaigns for Congress and the state Legislature, as well as for other local politicians.
—Venezuelan business mogul Raúl Gorrín. He was politically close to the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and is tight with current President Nicolás Maduro and reportedly tried to prevent U.S. sanctions against Venezuela’s government and state-run oil company. (The Trump administration later imposed the sanctions.) In late 2018, Gorrín was indicted in a money laundering and foreign corruption case unrelated to the Rivera matter and several of his real estate properties were seized in the Miami area. He lives in Caracas and is considered a fugitive.
There is no indication in the PDV USA court record that Perera, Nuhfer and Gorrín ever did any work to help the former congressman with his consulting project to spruce up the image of Venezuela’s U.S. subsidiary. Owned by parent Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., PDV USA is a holding company for Houston-based Citgo. Citgo refines Venezuelan oil and distributes fuel products in the United States.
Rivera and his consulting firm’s lawyers, as well as Nuhfer, did not return calls, emails or text messages seeking comment for this story.
Perera’s attorney, Simon Ferro, declined to answer a series of Miami Herald and el Nuevo Herald questions. “Mr. Perera doesn’t have any comments at this time because of the ongoing legal matters,” Ferro said Thursday.
In a Nov. 29, 2017, email filed in the PDV USA case, Rivera asked Perera and Nuhfer to provide their companies’ tax identification numbers and thanked them for their “hard work and great contributions” to the public relations effort for the Venezuelan subsidiary.
“This has really been a team effort and the performance by each subcontractor has been truly exceptional,” Rivera wrote in the email, before summarizing a series of 13 payments that his company, Interamerican Consulting, made to them in 2017.
Perera’s main company, PG & Associates, which develops residential projects in Miami, and his other firm, Krome Agronomics, which sells fertilizer products, received a total of $4.85 million from Rivera’s consulting firm as part of his PDV USA contract, court records show.
Nuhfer’s Miami business, Communication Solutions, Inc., received a total of $4.5 million from Rivera’s firm.
Lastly, a Miami company, Interglobal Yacht Management LLC, which provided maintenance services for ’s Gorrín’s yacht, received a total of $3.75 million from Rivera’s firm. The president of the company, Joel Brakha, said in a recent deposition that Rivera approached him in 2018 to sign the subcontracting agreement with Interglobal Yacht but he refused to do so. The actual subcontract had been signed by Rivera in 2017, court records show.
“I’m not signing it,” Brakha recalled saying to Rivera at their meeting in March 2018. “I think this has nothing do with me.”
Brakha said in his February 2022 deposition that the yacht company neither acted as a consultant nor provided any services for Rivera and his Venezuelan client, PDV USA. Brakha said that after talking with Gorrín, he thought the $3.75 million transferred to Interglobal Yacht was from a real estate deal between Rivera and Gorrín and that it was meant to pay for expenses on the Venezuelan businessman’s yacht.
Confusion over Rivera’s consulting contract with PDV USA has dominated the legal dispute and news media coverage — mainly because of the former congressman’s public statements about the agreement.
Back in May 2020, after being sued, Rivera would not comment on the specifics of his contract or whether he had taken a paycheck to represent a Venezuelan company controlled by the country’s socialist government. But in text messages he gave a murky explanation, hinting at a scheme to fund Maduro foes with proceeds from the oil consulting contract.
“All those funds went to the opposition for anti-Maduro protests in the summer of 2017,” Rivera wrote in the text messages to the Herald. “I never saw a penny of it. That’s all I know.” He added that the Trump administration, including the State Department, “were aware of everything.”
But lawyers for PDV USA said in their lawsuit that Rivera’s statement “defies credulity,” saying it would make no sense for Venezuela’s president, Maduro, to approve giving millions to Rivera’s consulting business to support Venezuelan politicians who oppose his government.
“Mr. Rivera’s claims in 2020 regarding the purpose of the (consulting) agreement are entirely inconsistent with Interamerican’s two progress reports, which contain numerous representations concerning a consulting project for PDV USA to benefit PDVSA,” Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, says the lawsuit filed by lawyers Jeffrey Korn and Michael Gottlieb.
Moreover, Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó emerged two years after Rivera signed his consulting contract with PDV USA. In 2019, the Trump administration recognized him over Maduro as Venezuela’s president, and it imposed sanctions against the country and the state-run oil company, PDVSA.
In response, however, lawyers for Rivera’s consulting company assert that he was working directly for the PDV USA subsidiary in the United States — not for the Venezuelan government or PDVSA.
“The president of Interamerican, David Rivera, proved to be the perfect person for the consulting role,” lawyers Tucker Byrd and Min Cho wrote in their answer to PDV USA’s lawsuit.
“As a former U.S. Congressman with more than 20 years of experience in governmental affairs and strategic planning (which includes previously working for the U.S. State Department and serving as an elected official at the state and local levels) Rivera had the experience, expertise, and skills to help (PDV USA’s) Citgo implement a strategic plan to develop an independent identity and to disengage from its Venezuelan parent.”
Rivera, a one-term congressman and former Florida legislator whose career has been dogged by ethics and campaign-finance violation complaints, once tried to expel a Venezuelan consul in Miami. He is also a close friend of U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, an arch critic of the Maduro administration. Rivera and Rubio, both Republicans, shared a house in Tallahassee when they were both in the state Legislature.
Interamerican’s lawyers contend that PDV USA is the one that breached the 2017 contract with Rivera’s consulting firm. “Interamerican asserts that it provided all the services required under the agreement, entitling it to retain the $20 million that PDV USA previously paid to Interamerican, and that PDV USA owes Interamerican the remaining balance of $30 million,” they say in court papers.
But lawyers for PDV USA, take an opposite stand in their lawsuit, saying Rivera and his consulting firm “performed no meaningful services under the agreement.” The Venezuela U.S. subsidiary is seeking to recover the money it paid to Interamerican in 2017, along with compensatory damages.
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