Multiple South Florida condos under state investigation for election fraud
Miami Herald
By: Enrique Flor & Brenda Medina
12 March 2016
Virgilia
Corces, an owner of a condominium at The Beach Club at Fontainebleau
Park, shows a copy of her forged signature from a condominium board
election that took place in November 2015. C.M. Guerrero
Nurse Virgilia Corcés is certain she did not vote in the election for
the board of directors of her condominium, The Beach Club at
Fontainebleau Park in northwest Miami-Dade. She was busy those days,
taking care of her father who is ailing with cancer.
Nevertheless, a vote with her signature turned up in the ballot boxes
at a ballroom on Flagler Street where the election was held — as did
the votes of dozens of apartment owners who now claim their signatures
were falsified.
“That’s not my signature,” said Corcés. “That’s a fraud.”
Four days earlier and 10 miles away in Hialeah, an election at the Los
Sueños condo resulted in an unprecedented tally: 115 percent of the
owners voted.
Another Hialeah complex, Bella Venezia, didn’t even hold an election in
2014. The reason, given to one owner by the company that administers
the apartments, was to “save money.”
Sometimes ... we
commit violations
“Sometimes, in an effort to save money (and BV needs every penny) we
commit violations,” the administrator wrote to an owner who had
complained about the lack of an election.
The allegations of electoral irregularities at The Beach Club, Los
Sueños and Bella Venezia are just part of the hundreds of complaints
submitted in 2015 by condo owners in Miami-Dade and Broward to the
Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR), the
state agency that supervises condo operations.
With nearly 1.6 million condos in Florida — 38 percent of them in
Miami-Dade and Broward — the state has long faced many difficulties
combating fraud and bribes to members of the board of directors and the
administrative companies that they hire. For decades, there have been
efforts to strengthen the state laws, but the application of those laws
has been inconsistent. And since the Great Recession, when the budgets
for the state and local regulatory agencies and state prosecutors faced
massive cutbacks, the challenges have been increasing.
The condo market is now booming again in South Florida. Giant cranes
dot the horizon along Biscayne Bay, the beaches and growing cities like
Doral, which have approved several new mega-projects. But will Florida
be able to respond to the demands for growth while protecting
condominium owners?
Frustrated condo residents say they have few options. Local police
agencies say that most of the complaints do not involve criminal
activities and can be handled in civil courts. Prosecutors say police
or the DBPR are responsible for enforcing the laws, but the state
agency argues that it cannot investigate complaints about actions that
fall outside its jurisdiction or that lack sufficient evidence.
the media launch an investigation
After receiving several complaints in recent months from residents
alleging financial mismanagement, lack of transparency and electoral
fraud in condominiums, el Nuevo Herald and Univisión 23 launched an
investigation.
Their findings included at least 84 fraudulent signatures on ballots for the board of directors at The Beach Club.
From the more than 500 complaints filed with the DBPR by condo owners
in Miami-Dade in 2015, the investigative team focused on the 81 cases
still under state investigation.
Of those, 27 involved alleged irregularities in elections to boards of
directors — people who approve lucrative contracts for the condos and
31 involved a lack of access to information that owners have a right to
obtain under state laws. Another nine cases involved allegations of
financial mismanagement. The rest involved the unauthorized use of
reserve funds, disputes over fines and other issues.
Miami-Dade recorded the highest number of complaints of irregularities
and fraud in the administration of condos of any county in 2015,
according to the DBPR. Out of 1,908 complaints received statewide, 566
were filed in Miami-Dade.
Elections at Fontainebleau
The alleged electoral fraud at The Beach Club may be one of the biggest scandals under investigation by the DBPR.
After the votes were counted on Nov. 24, Wilfredo Zayas, Guillermo Merique and Ivonne Andrade were declared the winners.
El Nuevo Herald tried to contact the three directors several times
during the last three weeks of February. Zayas and Andrade did not
reply to requests for interviews. Merique said only that the problems
at the condo stemmed from previous boards of directors, but declined
comment on possibly fraudulent signatures on the November ballots.
The lawyer for the owners’ association, Hector Martinez, declined comment because of attorney-client confidentiality.
Zayas was first elected to the board in November of 2014. Shortly
afterward, the board entered a contract with Florida’s Property
Management Group Corp. (FPM), a company that in recent years has been
accused of bad management by owners of other condos. State records show
the company was declared inactive in November of 2015.
But before it was deactivated, FPM vice president Juan Awais created
Sunshine Management Services, LLC, which assumed several of the FPM
contracts, including those of the Beach Club and Los Sueños
condominiums, said Sunshine administrator Juliet Siglier.
Sunshine stored all the documentation on the controversial election at
The Beach Club at its Miami Lakes office. At least four condo owners
went to the office in December and January to review the documents.
“I asked for access to the documents because by law they are required
to preserve them for only one year … and to be honest I was convinced
that there had been fraud in the balloting,” said Katherine Castro, a
resident who was a candidate in the election. She was ruled to have
lost. “I asked for the envelopes and made about 2,000 photographs, and
you could clearly see that there were fraudulent signatures.”
El Nuevo Herald and Univision 23 contacted 92 of the more than 500
owners recorded as having voted. Eighty four of them expressed concern
after confirming that their signatures had been blatantly falsified on
the ballot envelopes submitted for the condo elections.
Among the owners who said their signatures were faked was Pamela Silva
Conde, host of Primer Impacto, a Univisión news program, and political
campaign consultant Sasha Tirador.
Tirador said that on the night of the election she was alerted that two
votes with her signature had turned up in the ballot boxes. She
immediately went to the party room where the ballots were being counted.
“There was one ballot that said Sasha Tirador, but it was not my
signature,” said Tirador. “Unfortunately, the institutions where we can
report these types of crimes do not investigate them.”
On the night of the election, one key witness documented the
irregularities: Tomás Rementería, a monitor appointed by the DBPR’s
Office of the Condominium Ombudsman.
Rementeria reported to the Ombudsman’s office that 542 votes had been received from the owners of 712 apartments.
From that seemingly massive turnout, 103 votes were thrown out,
including 57 because there were two ballots from the same owner and 26
for adulterations confirmed by the voters themselves. The remainder
came from open envelopes or from people not authorized to vote.
The fraud was so evident that Dolores Fernandez, one of the four people
in charge of counting the votes, told El Nuevo Herald that she saw that
her own signature had been falsified.
From fraud to apathy
On Nov. 20, the election at the Los Sueños condo in Hialeah saw 115
percent of the owners participate. That is, 457 votes were cast in a
complex of 396 units — in an election where each unit had only one
vote. Half the 457 votes were thrown out, including 174 that were
duplicate votes, according to Monica Hidalgo, a monitor contracted by
the owners’ association.
The tally gave Arelys López her seventh year as president of Los
Sueños, a condo that like The Beach Club is administered by Sunshine.
After the astonishing vote tally, the group of owners that lost the election filed a complaint to the DBPR.
José Guerrero and María Porras, owners who challenged the López
presidency, declined comment on the alleged falsification of
signatures. But attorney Guillermo Mancebo, who represents Guerrero,
alleged in the complaint that the election was fraudulent.
“The association falsified ballots as well as sworn declarations
designed to disqualify the votes of members who oppose the persons
elected as association directors, in an inappropriate manner, and
critics of the (Sunshine) administration company,” said Mancebo.
When an el Nuevo Herald reporter asked López if she was comfortable
with her victory in an election where 115 percent of the eligible
voters cast ballots, she replied that holding a new election would only
“spend more money,” and added that the fraud was carried out by the
candidates that lost.
At the other extreme, the Bella Venezia condominium did not hold
elections in 2014, arguing that it wanted to “save money” even though
that violated state laws and the condo’s own regulations.
Elena Soutullo, who owns two apartments in the complex, there were also no elections held between 2010 and 2013.
Rosario Gonzalez, an official of Neighborhood Property Management,
Inc., a Hialeah company that administers the complex, said that in
those years there were fewer than five candidates for the five board of
directors slots, so reelections were automatic.
Soutullo and other owners filed a complaint to the DBPR in August of
2014, but have received no reply. Soutullo then elevated her complaint
to the Florida Inspector General in April of 2015. The investigation
was reopened.
“The DBPR discovered that the condo had no (cash) reserves. Without
consulting the owners, they had been using it (reserves) for daily
expenses,” said Soutullo.
Amid the complaints, the condo held new elections on Dec. 7. Nineteen
of the 72 owners participated and for the eighth year elected Aurelio
Martinez, who declined to comment for this report.
Falsifications at The Beach Club
The front
entrance of the The Beach Club at Fontainebleau Park, a condominium
community where a battle is brewing over dozens of forged signatures of
condo owners for a condo board election on Wednesday March 2, 2016 C.M.
Guerrero
The investigation by el Nuevo Herald and Univision 23 of The Beach Club
election found that at least 20 signed votes were mailed from the main
U.S. Postal Service office in Miami on the same day, Nov. 19. Those
envelopes had no return names or addresses.
One of those ballots was signed in the name of Mónica Espinosa, an
accountant who that day happened to be vacationing in Venice, Italy.
“I never sent any vote by mail,” said Espinosa, who showed reporters
her U.S. passport, with entry and exit stamps from the Rome airport,
and some of her vacation photos. “On the 19th (of November) I was very
happy, taking a tour on a gondola. What frustrates me is that my
signature was falsified, and I think that whoever did this are
criminals.”
Other questionable signatures were from owners who rent their apartment
and do not usually participate in the condominium elections. Several
live in Texas, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela.
“It’s the first time that something like this happens to me, and I
imagine that it’s something that carries criminal penalties,” said Jose
Mera, a businessman who lives in the Dominican Republic. He said he
bought The Beach Club unit eight years ago to rent it and never
participates in its elections.
At least one person, Paola Silvestri, filed a complaint about the
fraudulent signatures with the Miami-Dade Police department. Silvestri
said her complaint never got beyond a police report, even though under
Florida law it’s a crime to falsify signatures.
“They did nothing!” said Silvestri. Her mother, Aliria Stoppa, owns the unit. She lives in Venezuela.
Under state law, falsifying a signature is a third degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of $5,000.
the capital of fraud
“This is happening everywhere in the state, but Miami-Dade county is
the capital of fraud in the (condo) associations,” said Julio Robaina,
who led a fight in favor of condo owners when he was a state
representative from 2002 to 2010. He now owns a condo administration
company.
A DBPR spokesperson, in an email sent in November, said complaints are
investigated “if there is a reasonable suspicion that a violation of
the law took place.”
“In general, this means that the complainant provides evidence
supporting the probability that a violation has taken place,” wrote
Chelsea Eagles, DBPR director of communications. “If the complainant
simply suspects that there’s something wrong or assumes that an illegal
action has taken place, we urge them to access and review the official
records of the association for evidence to support the complaint. In
the absence of any evidence of a violation of the law, the complaint is
closed without further action.”
That was not the first time that an election at The Beach Club had been marred by alleged irregularities.
In 2014, the monitor Rementeria reported that more than 100 votes had
been thrown out, 36 of them because there were two ballots from the
same owner.
“The number of double ballots was significant,” Rementeria wrote in the report he submitted to the state.
The report added that two of the owners who took part in the election
found that someone else had already voted under their names. The two
owners were able to verify that their signatures on the votes cast had
been falsified.
“In both cases, the falsified votes came from the box of ballots
submitted by Mrs. Carlín Castillo,” Rementeria wrote in his report.
Castillo told el Nuevo Herald and Univisión 23 that she was not responsible for the fraudulent ballots.
“Anyone interested in messing with the elections could have done it,”
Castillo said. “We never learned who put in those double votes … I
myself was not going to disgrace a process in which for the first time
a monitor from Tallahassee was taking part in our election, and in
which I myself picked up some of the ballots because we needed to
change the board of directors and the administration company.”
Univisión 23 reporter Erika Carrillo contributed to this report.
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