MIAMI — Nearly two years ago, former Miami-Dade Congressman David Rivera was charged with secretly operating as a foreign agent for the Venezuelan government.

But an associate who helped Rivera obtain a $50 million contract with a U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela’s national oil company ended up conspicuously absent from Rivera’s conspiracy indictment in Miami federal court.

His name: Hugo Perera. A previously convicted cocaine trafficker, Perera has been given a pass by federal authorities who instead are using him as a cooperating witness against Rivera. In a 2017 business deal, Rivera paid Perera about $5 million for making critical introductions that led to Rivera landing his firm’s extraordinarily high-paying consulting contract with the U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, PDVSA.

On Monday, Rivera turned the screws on his former business associate. Rivera’s consulting firm sued two of Perera’s marketing companies in Miami federal court, accusing him of violating a confidentiality agreement when Perera turned over a 2018 legal memo about their business relationship to prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami.

Secret memo

The secret memo was written by the Miami law firm Cozen O’Connor the year after Rivera’s firm, Interamerican Consulting, Inc., signed its contract with PDV USA. The 2017 consulting contract, though fraught with politics because of the Venezuelan government’s uneasy relationship with the United States, spelled out that Rivera’s firm was to focus on improving the domestic image of PDV USA’s main interest, CITGO, an oil-refinery business headquartered in Houston.

That Rivera would sue a cooperating witness in his federal case for damages from their lucrative business dealings is rather unusual, though not unprecedented.

“Rivera is not the first defendant in a criminal case to try to undermine a cooperating witness by suing them,” said Joseph DeMaria, a Miami defense attorney who once worked on the Justice Department’s organized crime strike force in South Florida. “Usually, the government can put a stop to the civil lawsuit until the criminal prosecution is completed.”

If prosecutors don’t put a stop to this suit, Rivera may be able to question Perera and use that testimony to undermine him as a cooperating witness, DeMaria said. But, Perera’s attorneys will be able to question Rivera under oath and then he will have to choose between taking the Fifth Amendment or creating evidence that prosecutors can use against him in the criminal trial, he said.

Rivera’s suit says little about the Coven memo. However, it does say the marketing agreements between Rivera and Perera’s companies required them to maintain confidentially about their business dealings, unless one side gave permission to the other to reveal details to a third party.

The other exception to this rule: One side “may disclose information” if ordered to do so by a civil or criminal subpoena, but only after first giving the other side a “reasonable opportunity to contest” the subpoena, according to the suit.

Rivera, who is represented by Miami attorney Jeffrey Feldman, declined to comment about the suit.

It is not clear whether Perera was compelled by a grand jury subpoena to turn over the Coven memo or any other confidential information from his business dealings with Rivera to federal prosecutors — or whether he voluntarily gave it to them. Perera’s defense attorney, Neil Schuster, declined to comment.

In a parallel civil case, lawyers for the U.S. subsidiary of PDVSA sued Rivera’s consulting company in 2020 to recover payments from him and are still fighting over obtaining the Coven memo and other key evidence. A federal magistrate judge in Miami ruled that the memo was not protected by attorney-client privilege — a decision now on appeal that might ultimately affect Rivera’s suit against Perera.

In the mid-1990s, Perera pleaded guilty to cocaine trafficking and tax fraud charges in a massive drug-smuggling case against the notorious Cali Cartel, according to federal court records. He played a supporting role as a distributor for the cartel in South Florida and was sentenced to eight years in prison, court records show.

Fisher Island connections

But after he was released, Perera reinvented himself as a businessman and affordable housing developer in Miami and has lived on exclusive Fisher Island for years. He came to know Rivera through the Miami-Dade political consultant and fundraiser, Esther Nuhfer.

In 2017, Perera introduced Rivera to a powerful Venezuelan businessman, Raul Gorrin, a lawyer by training who owned a TV station in Caracas and was close to Venezuela’s political leaders. At the time, Perera and Gorrin were neighbors on Fisher Island.

It was Gorrin who opened doors for Rivera and his consulting company to land the $50 million contract with the U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela’s national oil company, PDVSA, in March 2017.

During this same period, before the Trump administration began imposing sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry, Perera was working behind the scenes with Republican-connected lobbyist Brian Ballard on Venezuelan business opportunities, according to sources familiar with them.

Together, they advised wealthy Gulf Stream businessman Harry Sargeant III and Oklahoman Todd Swanson, CEO of Horizontal Well Drillers, on negotiations with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and PDVSA’s president Manuel Quevedo regarding oil-drilling rights in Venezuela.

As a result of Perera’s connections with Gorrin, Rivera’s consulting firm collected $20 million from its contract with the PDVSA subsidiary in just two months before the company rescinded the contract in April 2017, according to a lawsuit filed against Rivera’s company by the subsidiary three years later. Of that amount, Rivera paid $13.1 million to Perera, Gorrin and Nuhfer in side fees, according to evidence in the civil suit.

Now, Rivera’s firm is suing Perera’s marketing companies to recover the $4.85 million that he paid to Perera for making introductions to Gorrin. In 2017, Rivera paid that amount to Perera’s two marketing companies: Krome Agronomics and PG and Associates, court records show.

As part of the consulting deal, Rivera also paid $3.75 million to Gorrin’s Miami company, Interglobal Yacht Management, and $4.5 million to Nuhfer’s firm, Communication Solutions, records show.

Rivera, perhaps best known as a conservative, anti-Castro politician who served one term as a Miami-Dade Republican congressman between 2011 and 2013, is accused in the indictment of accepting massive fees from the U.S. subsidiary of the Venezuela’s state-owned oil company that federal prosecutors say was actually a fig leaf for lobbying on behalf of Venezuela and its authoritarian leader, Maduro.

In December 2023, Rivera and Nuhfer were charged by an indictment accusing them of conspiring to commit offenses against the United States and failing to register as foreign agents with the U.S. Attorney General’s Office as part of their consulting work for Venezuela’s oil subsidiary, PDV USA — along with money laundering.

The indictment accuses Rivera and Nuhfer of conspiring to “unlawfully enrich themselves by engaging in political activities in the United States on behalf of the Government of Venezuela ... in an effort to influence United States foreign policy toward Venezuela.” It further accuses them of trying “to conceal these efforts by failing to register under [federal law] as agents of the Government of Venezuela and by creating the false appearance that they were providing consulting services to PDV USA.“

In the past, Rivera has defended his actions by saying he was really working for the U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company — not directly as a consultant for the Venezuelan government in the United States — and therefore he didn’t need to register as a foreign agent. But the indictment filed by prosecutor Harold Schimkat in Miami says Rivera and Nuhfer were actually lobbying for the Venezuelan government to normalize relations between the socialist South American country and the United States.

According to the indictment, Rivera and Nuhfer met with an unidentified U.S. senator in Washington to discuss the normalization plan in 2017, but to no avail because Maduro’s government ultimately would not make a commitment to such a deal.

Meeting with Rubio

Sources familiar with the case say Rivera and Nuhfer met with Marco Rubio, the Republican senior senator from Florida, who purchased a home with Rivera when the two were serving in Florida’s House of Representatives.

Rubio is not identified in the indictment by name, but has confirmed that he met with Rivera and discussed Maduro. (President-elect Donald Trump recently said he plans to nominate Rubio, known as a hardliner against Venezuela, as secretary of state.)

Additionally, the indictment says, Rivera collaborated with Gorrin to arrange a meeting between Congressman Pete Sessions of Texas, a Republican, and Maduro in Caracas. On April 2, 2018, the indictment says, Rivera, Gorrin and Sessions met with Maduro and other Venezuelan politicians to discuss normalizing relations between the United States and Venezuela. As part of the meeting, Sessions agreed to carry a letter with that proposal from Maduro to Trump, but their efforts were ultimately unsuccessful.

Ultimately, the Trump administration imposed strong sanctions against PDVSA and a handful of top members of Maduro’s administration in 2018. Maduro himself was indicted in New York on drug-trafficking charges stemming from his alleged role in a Venezuelan cartel.

Meanwhile, Rivera’s high-paying lobbying deal with Venezuela’s U.S. subsidiary, PDV USA, went from bad to worse. In 2020, the subsidiary’s lawsuit accused Rivera of barely doing any work for his $50 million contract and sought to recover the $20 million it had paid him before cutting him off three years earlier.

Court documents in both the civil and federal cases revealed that Rivera diverted more than half of his PDV USA income — $13 million — to the three subcontractors in Miami who supposedly provided “international strategic consulting services” for the Venezuelan firm.

Rivera and Nuhfer communicated with Perera and Gorrin about the consulting contract with PDV USA through encrypted text messages, according to the indictment.

Gorrin, who was indicted in a separate foreign corruption and money-laundering case in 2018 and indicted again in another similar case this year in Miami federal court, is not mentioned by name in the new indictment.

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El Nuevo Herald staff writer Antonio Maria Delgado contributed to this story.

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