MIAMI — In his first term as mayor of Miami, Francis Suarez increased his personal net worth five-fold as he used his public office to court technology and real estate companies eyeing business opportunities in the Magic City.
Financial disclosures filed annually with the city and state show Suarez’s net worth increased from $245,015 to $1,338,551 between mid-2017 and the end of 2021. But the records do not provide an income breakdown, obscuring important details that could provide insight into the mayor’s expanding wealth — which does not appear to factor in any increased value of his three properties but includes $750,000 sitting in a bank account at the time of his last disclosure.
A new disclosure covering 2022 is expected to be released on July 3.
Since becoming mayor, records show Suarez has hopscotched between jobs at ever-larger law firms and, more recently, become a partner at a private equity firm. He has also taken on other jobs not listed in the disclosures, including one consulting arrangement with a real estate developer that is currently at the center of a federal investigation.
Florida law doesn’t require Suarez — who is now a candidate for the Republican nomination for president — to disclose sources of income under 5% of his total annual earnings, making it impossible to determine with certainty the extent of his outside employment from local and state records alone.
Many local politicians have other jobs and it’s not unusual for them to have a seven-figure net worth. But Suarez refuses to provide a comprehensive list of his private clients. And his financial circumstances stand out because his time in the mayor’s office corresponds directly with the exponential increase in his personal wealth — which had been in negative numbers.
While many see Suarez’s recent financial success as evidence of business acumen, ethics experts are concerned that Miami’s mayor is inappropriately exploiting his public office for personal gain. And each new job adds financial incentives and pressure on Suarez — a part-time mayor who makes $130,000 from his public office — to prioritize his private business over the interests of the city and its residents.
Barbara Petersen of the Florida Center for Government Accountability, a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on local government accountability, said Suarez appears to be leveraging his position as mayor into lucrative offers for outside work.
“They are not hiring Suarez, they are hiring Mayor Suarez, quite clearly, because that is giving them some kind of advantage,” Petersen said. “Whether it’s direct or indirect it’s still giving them a leg up.”
Neither the mayor’s office nor Suarez’s campaign responded to multiple requests for comment.
Records show the mayor’s net worth reached seven digits for the first time in 2021, as Suarez used his public office to promote Miami as a mecca for technology companies and venture capital. That year alone Suarez added at least six new positions to his portfolio of outside work, including joining DaGrosa Capital, a Coral Gables-based private equity firm looking to break into the real estate sector.
“Under Mayor Suarez’s leadership, Miami has become a magnet for businesses, technology entrepreneurs and investment talent,” said Joseph DaGrosa, founder and chairman, when he announced Suarez as a senior operating partner of his firm.
When he took the job — which included a board seat on a local realty brokerage where DaGrosa was a partner — Suarez said the work would not conflict with his role as mayor because the firm had “no business with the city nor will they.” DaGrosa did not respond to the Herald’s request for comment.
An internet search reveals that in 2021 Suarez also held other positions, not listed on his disclosures, including a paid seat on the board of a local tech conference, eMerge Americas, an advisory role at a solar energy start-up, and a consulting arrangement with a crypto mining venture caught up in a broader investigation led by the Senate Finance Committee.
County ethics codes prohibit the mayor from using his “official position to secure special privileges or exemptions” for himself or others. City email records show that on more than one occasion the members of the mayor’s staff have done favors for businesses closely tied to Suarez or his outside employers.
Whether he is at City Hall or headlining a cryptocurrency conference downtown, it can be difficult to determine if he is acting as mayor on behalf of his constituents or on behalf of a private client — or both.
In January, Suarez attended the ceremonial groundbreaking of a Coconut Grove mixed-use development featuring co-living spaces pitched as a solution to the city’s housing affordability crisis. But as he scooped dirt and smiled for cameras, the mayor did not disclose that he was earning $10,000 per month from his consulting for Rishi Kapoor, the developer on the project.
Suarez’s work for Kapoor is under investigation by state and federal authorities following a series of Miami Herald articles showing Kapoor tapped the mayor and his staff to help resolve a zoning issue stalling his $70 million project in 2022. City emails also show the mayor’s office worked closely with Kapoor for years on draft legislation to change the zoning codes.
Although the draft ordinance was never adopted, the relationship between the mayor’s office and the man who would pay Suarez at least $170,000, provides a window into how the mayor works behind the scenes in City Hall.
As mayor, Suarez has a reputation for rarely attending city commission meetings, preferring instead to delegate his officiating duties and whip votes in private, one-on-one meetings with individual members of the commission. While meetings between voting members of the commission are prohibited under Florida law, the Miami mayor has no vote — only a veto — giving Suarez the anomalous freedom to set an agenda far from the public eye.
As a presidential candidate, Suarez is required to file a more comprehensive report with the Federal Elections Commission by July 14 that will provide new insight into the mayor’s financial interests. Unlike the city and state disclosures, the federal election rules require both Suarez and his wife to itemize their sources of income and other financial information dating back to the beginning of 2022.
“When he was not a commissioner he was just a real estate attorney working out of a small office,” said former Miami mayor Tomás Regalado, who served alongside Suarez when the latter was first elected to city government in 2009. “When he was commissioner, he started getting business. And when he became mayor, I guess he dazzled a lot of people.”
Regalado, an open critic of the current mayor, plans to run again in 2025 when Suarez is term-limited.
The mayor’s legal work
When Los Angeles-based Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan hired Suarez as the firm sought to sink roots in South Florida in 2021, the mayor provided the firm opinions he obtained from both state and county ethics commissions regarding his employment and conflict-of-interest prohibitions.
An international litigation firm, Quinn Emanuel’s client roster includes billionaire hedge fund manager and real estate investor Ken Griffin, who recently announced he was moving the headquarters of his firm, Citadel, to Miami from Chicago. Griffin, now the richest person in Florida, is planning to build a $1 billion tower on Biscayne Bay. The mayor has called him a friend.
Representatives of Citadel are registered to lobby in the city of Miami.
In a written opinion issued to the mayor on Jan. 6, 2020, Jose Arrojo, executive director of the Miami-Dade ethics commission, cautioned Suarez to avoid participating in discussions regarding any matter brought in front of the city commission by a client of the law firm where he works.
Even if Suarez was not representing the client himself, Arrojo wrote, there was still a “reasonable possibility” that the mayor could — directly or indirectly — benefit from helping the firm’s client with city business. Ultimately, he wrote, whether such action might violate county conflict-of-interest prohibitions would depend on various factors, including the importance of the client to the firm and the extent to which the mayor has familiarity with the client.
Since joining Quinn Emanuel in 2021, Suarez has been a vocal supporter of Griffin, who recently gave $1 million to Suarez’s political committee.
Staffers in the mayor’s office have also worked closely with Citadel on at least two occasions regarding press coverage of Griffin’s controversial proposal to move a historic mansion off his newly purchased waterfront estate — a plan requiring approval from the city’s historic preservation board.
As first reported by the Daily Beast, the mayor’s spokesperson, Soledad Cedro, wrote an article — one that was highly complimentary of Griffin — in a Spanish-language publication about the developer’s plan for the historic home without disclosing her taxpayer-funded job at the city. When congratulated by Griffin’s staff, city emails show Cedro offered to write more articles beneficial to the hedge funder.
Suarez himself has also publicly supported parts of Griffin’s proposal.
Citadel spokesperson Zia Ahmed said that Griffin has not asked for Suarez’s help with city permits, and that all projects will “go through the standard public approval process.” But Ahmed acknowledged that doesn’t prevent Suarez from offering unsolicited advice or commentary to Griffin or others.
“As is widely known, the mayor asks for and gives advice to everyone on how he can make Miami an even better city for all Miamians,” he said.
A spokesperson for Quinn Emanuel said the company has internal guidelines based on the ethics opinions that wall off Suarez from representing any clients who have business in front of the city, and require Suarez to recuse himself from any city business involving the firm’s clients.
“To the best of our knowledge he has followed those guidelines,” the spokesperson said.
Griffin has funded several city initiatives promoted by the mayor, including one to provide scholarships to college students in programs related to science and technology. Griffin praised the mayor’s “commitment to opportunity and freedom for everyone in Miami” in a statement to the Herald.
“Mayor Suarez is a major part of the Miami growth story,” Griffin said. “He is an incredible advocate for our community, fighting for better schools, quality jobs, and safer neighborhoods.”
A hot brand
Suarez’s financial success dovetailed with the city’s rising national profile as a technology and innovation hub — a brand the mayor supercharged with a viral tweet.
“How can I help?” Suarez tweeted on Dec. 4, 2020, in response to a suggestion that Silicon Valley move to Miami. At the time, the mayor had just over 30,000 Twitter followers. One year later, that number surged to 125,000.
With the tweet as a catalyst, Suarez launched a city initiative called Venture Miami that used both city funds and federal COVID-19 relief money to attract technology companies to South Florida. He lobbied for new state laws that would have paved the way for wider use of cryptocurrencies.
A billboard went up in San Francisco encouraging techies and investors, chafing under high rent and political polarization in the Bay Area, to message Suarez on Twitter about moving to Miami.
More people moved to Miami in the final months of 2021 than any other metropolitan area, according to the real estate brokerage Redfin. That year, the South Florida Business Journal reported, Miami startups attracted $2.4 billion in venture capital investments.
In an article for the online magazine Tablet, Miami native Grazie Sophia Christie wrote that Suarez knew how to speak to a generation of people “primed by the 24/7 headline, the silicon hyperbole, the unicorns and the big-number braggadocio and the self-belief reinforced for years and years by our own algorithms.”
“Suarez knows how to speak to us because it is in this tone that the citizens of Miami have always spoken,” Christie wrote.
Suarez’s personal net worth doubled in the year following his viral tweet, as he took positions with at least half a dozen companies seeking to capitalize on the growing buzz around Miami and its charismatic mayor.
“To his credit, the mayor is a shrewd, astute, and canny practitioner of self-enriching, rent-seeking behavior across both public and private sectors of the Miami political and financial ecosystem,” said Anthony Alfieri, founding director of the Center for Ethics and Public Service at the University of Miami School of Law.
“Indeed, by any measure, he has been rewarded for his casual disdain of the values of open and responsible government,” Alfieri said.
‘Bitcoin mayor’
Anointed the “Bitcoin mayor,” Suarez has made his public office a soapbox for digital currency and blockchain technology.
Suarez made headlines when he began to convert his mayoral salary to Bitcoin, encouraging others to do the same. He threw his political weight behind MiamiCoin, a digital currency whose value quickly plummeted.
The mayor’s Instagram and YouTube channels feature interviews with dozens of tech entrepreneurs, crypto brands and start-ups, including the now-bankrupt FTX and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, who had planned to move FTX’s national headquarters to Miami before the company’s spectacular implosion. Bankman-Fried now faces charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
Among those Suarez has promoted are companies with whom he has consulting arrangements — although the mayor has not always been candid about the connections.
Last January, Suarez appeared in a promotional video for the 2022 North American Bitcoin Conference wearing a t-shirt branded with the logo of Redivider Blockchain Opportunity Zone — a little-known crypto mining venture that was looking to establish one of its projects in South Florida.
What Suarez didn’t make clear in the video — still pinned to the top of the tech conference’s website — or during his opening remarks at the conference was that he had recently been brought on as a formal advisor to the company whose brand he was wearing that day.
In a December 2021 press release announcing the hire, Redivider CEO Tom Frazier said “there is no better ally for the mission of Redivider than Mayor Suarez.” But Frazier told the Herald he hadn’t asked Suarez to wear the shirt and denied that the start-up had benefited from the mayor’s subtle brand promotion at the conference that drew celebrities and venture capitalists.
At that time Suarez was brought on as an advisor, Redivider was negotiating with Homestead to build a $15 million Bitcoin mining plant with thousands of computers used for solving the complex math problems required to generate a unique, new digital coin.
Redivider sought to build the project in a federally designated Opportunity Zone, where investors get tax breaks as an incentive to pursue projects in low-income areas. The plan was also to strike a deal with the city — one of the few Florida municipalities with its own electric utility — to get a discounted rate for power.
Homestead Mayor Steve Losner, who championed the proposal, said the potential revenue generated by such a large energy consumer justified the premium rate. But, he said in a recent interview, “the bottom fell out before we ever got to that point.”
Rather than bring in jobs and revenue as promised, a consultant for the city determined Redivider’s proposed rate was so low that the city could end up footing the bill for some of the private company’s power.
Around the time the project was scuttled in early 2021, Frazier received a letter from the Senate Finance Committee notifying him that Redivider was a target of a broader investigation into whether “cryptocurrency mining may be seeking to avoid taxes without meaningfully benefiting distressed communities using the Opportunity Zone program.”
Frazier responded to the committee’s inquiry, saying the company would create 1,000 jobs nationwide over the next 10 years but suggested it was the quality, more than the quantity, of jobs that made the most impact.
Committee spokesperson Ryan Carey said the investigation found that the Opportunity Zone program generally was “ripe for abuse by investors” but provided few specifics. The committee never followed up with Redivider after the initial response.
Frazier said Suarez was not involved in the Homestead project, and said the company currently operates just one Bitcoin mining plant in New Hampshire.
He declined to provide specifics regarding Suarez’s job description or compensation, except to describe the mayor as an on-call advisor.
“Any time I called him and asked him for advice, he’s been very helpful,” Frazier said.
