As a Congressional candidate, Miami-Dade School Board Member Carlos Curbelo has said repeatedly that it is time for the voters in Distrct 26 to have 
a representative that is not embroiled in scandal.
Everyone knows he is referring to not just Congressman Joe Garcia, whose chief of staff served a 90-day sentence for absentee ballot fraud, but also to former Congressman David Rivera, a fellow Republican who federal prosecutors believe illegally funded a Democratic challenger to Garcia in 2012 and was dogged by previous allegations of creative accounting on which prosecutors seemed to drag their feet until they statute ran out or their case dried up.
Time and again Curbelo has said he wants to bring transparency and a clean slate to the District. He’s even made it part of his pitch for contributions, which will help “put an end to the scandals and fraud that have haunted our community for too long.”
But maybe Curbelo hasn’t been embroiled in controversy yet because he’s hiding something: His client list. He’s found a way to dodge disclosure laws so that he doesn’t have to tell us who he’s working for.
The lobbyist — well, he says he does PR — has a well known company, Capitol Gains, that, as the name and logo implies, concentrates on business with government entities. It also donates regularly to political campaigns.
But it’s not really Curbelo’s company. On paper. Because his wife, Cecilia Curbelo, is registered as the owner on Florida state corporate documents — even though she has never worked a day there in her life. Okay, maybe she made copies for him one day, but you smart asses know what I mean. This is Curbelo’s company. Everyone knows it. She’s a front.
Why would Curbelo turn his baby, the company he formed in 2002 — “just months out of college,” like it says on his website, which by the way doesn’t mention the title transfer — and groomed over time, over to his wife of
three years (at the time)? He says it was to cut business ties while he worked in the Senate. Ladra says it is to avoid financial reporting requirements that may not be convenient for an elected, especially one with higher political aspirations.
Curbelo told Ladra the company’s ownership was changed to his wife’s name in 2009, when he went to work for then Sen. George Lemieux. Senate attorneys, he said, advised him that it would be better if he did not have interests in a private company like that one. I guess it was to avoid the perception of improprieties without avoiding the improprieties themselves. Ladra doesn’t know how to confirm that, since he didn’t give me any particular attorney’s name. And it is a silly argument that I cannot believe our Senate attorneys espouse, since a name change doesn’t actually change anything else. It just clouds it. Capitol Gains was then, has always been and still is Carlos Curbelo’s company, even if it is his wife’s on paper and, as he says, a law firm ran it for him while he worked for Lemieux. And one might think that simply having it run by someone else would be enough.
Corporate filings indicate that he resigned as managing member in October of 2009. He may or may not already have been campaigning, even privately, because th
e very next year he was elected to the School Board. And, though he stopped working for the Senator when he won — and we don’t know how much campaigning he did on his federal time and the taxpayers’ dime — he never returned the company to its rightful owner. On paper. The company has stayed in his wife’s name long after he left the Senate in 2010. He says he had no reason to change it back.
“Why would I? I trust my wife,” he told Ladra.
Why would you? To be transparent, maybe.
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