Despite huge election fine, David Rivera is a candidate again

Former Miami Congressman David Rivera, who is under federal investigation over a consulting arrangement with the Venezuelan state-run oil company and was recently ordered to pay a six-figure penalty for violating campaign finance laws, is running for state House again.

Mere hours before the end of the period to qualify for the November ballot, Rivera filed his paperwork with the Florida Division of Elections on Friday to run for state House District 119. The open seat in West Miami-Dade County, which includes parts of West Kendall and The Hammocks, had so far not attracted many well-known candidates.

Rivera did not immediately respond to a request for comment on his decision to run. As of noon, Rivera had not qualified to be on the ballot.

Rivera, a former state representative and one-term member of Congress, has been at the center of several ethical and criminal probes in the past several years, most recently over whether or not he failed to register as a foreign agent to lobby for the U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-run oil company, PDV USA, through his Florida-based firm, Interamerican Consulting, Inc., to help improve the company’s image and reputation. The company was then under control of Venezuela’s socialist President Nicolás Maduro.

According to a lawsuit filed in 2020, the contract Rivera quietly signed with the company in 2017 was worth $50 million, an extraordinary deal for a former Republican lawmaker who had built a career in South Florida railing against Cuba’s communist regime under former leader Fidel Castro. Rivera’s firm has since been sued by PDV USA for $15 million over allegations that he did not do enough work.

The Miami Herald revealed that Rivera diverted about two-thirds of his $15 million income from PDV USA to three subcontractors in Miami who allegedly provided “international strategic consulting services” for the Venezuelan firm, including a yacht company controlled by a wealthy Venezuelan businessman who was later indicted on money-laundering charges in Miami, Raúl Gorrín. The other two were Esther Nuhfer, a former campaign aide and fundraiser in Miami-Dade who is close to Rivera, and Hugo Perera, a convicted cocaine trafficker in Miami who is now a developer.

That case is still ongoing. Last month, U.S. Rep. Bob Menendez sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland asking why Rivera has not faced any charges over allegations that he violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

“The American people deserve to know whether a former Republican member of Congress was secretly doing the bidding of a dictator responsible for committing crimes against humanity in Venezuela,” Menendez said in the letter.

Rivera, 56, was also ordered to pay $456,000 in April, a civil penalty that concludes a five-year legal battle between Rivera and the Federal Elections Commission for being part of a scheme to pay a straw candidate in a 2012 Democratic primary against his likely opponent, Democrat Joe Garcia. Rivera was not criminally convicted in that scheme, but a federal judge issued a permanent injunction preventing him from breaking campaign finance law in the future.

Miami Herald staff writer Jay Weaver and el Nuevo Herald staff writer Antonio Maria Delgado contributed to this story.

Bianca Padró Ocasio is a political writer for the Miami Herald. She has been a Florida journalist for four years, covering everything from crime and courts to hurricanes and politics.