Miamian trying to buy anti-tank weapons was busted. Did offshore secrecy hide his assets?

When Miami resident Vincent Ghahremani was arrested in a DEA sting operation trying to buy Russian anti-tank weapons on behalf of what he thought was a Mexican drug cartel, he’d kept enough secrets to fill a trunk.

Born in Iran but using a Spanish address and traveling under a Norwegian passport, Ghahremani, 47, relied on secrecy for his varied global ventures. To facilitate the secrecy, he turned to Formations House, an offshore services provider in London.

Documents leaked from the firm, including a copy of his passport, show Formations House was aware he claimed he was funneling Iranians’ money into his business ventures. It was at a time when such activity would either violate Iran sanctions or, at the least, give financial institutions pause.

In several emails, he also told Formations House he’d snapped up distressed properties in South Florida and partnered in a firm that invested in the tax debt of Floridians fighting to keep their homes.

Ghahremani boasted in an email on June 15, 2012, of his partnership in AFXCapital.com, a Cyprus-based online currency trading platform that was about to hit it big.

“We just achived [sic] our FSA license in Cyprus for our forex platform and we are selling white labels at 50K each,” he wrote in business-speak that meant he’d let others sublet that platform for $50,000 apiece.

AFX Capital Markets Ltd. and its U.S. subsidiary, AFX Capital US Corp, are now in bankruptcy. Its U.S. trustee said she’d never heard of Ghahremani.

The projects he boasted of in emails to Formations House were in the background of the mother of all business deals. It was not to be. The deal was the DEA sting operation.

Court documents show It began in 2014 with a DEA informant in Miami and led to his arrest in 2015 in Barcelona for conspiring to acquire weapons and even helicopters for a drug cartel, although he never actually got a hold of them.

Ghahremani now hears the lonesome whistle blow at the McRae Correctional Institution, a privately run federal prison south of Macon, Ga., where the warden’s office did not make him available.

His secrets might have stayed there if not for a giant leak of roughly one million documents from Formations House ⁠— whose services, while legal, can be used by scammers and fraudsters to evade taxes and hide assets through faux banks and offshore shell companies.

The massive leak, 131 gigabytes of data, includes private communications, incorporation certificates and other business documents. It was leaked to journalists earlier this year, and after months of collaboration news organizations across the globe are collectively publishing this week under the title #29Leaks.

The name refers to the upscale address of Formations House at 29 Harley Street in central London. Similar to the 2016 Panama Papers, the document leak spotlights anew the risks posed by anonymity in offshore shell companies and the role played by their providers.

The documents were given to journalists by the anti-secrecy group Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoS. The group did not say how it obtained the documents.

Charlotte Pawar, the head of Formations House, said in a written response to questions from reporting partners that the data was stolen and that DDoS tried to extort her. She did not provide evidence of that.

Asked about Ghahremani, she responded: “This person is not a client of Formations House at this time and has not been since 2015.”

OFFSHORE SPREE

Formations House records show Ghahremani was a buyer of nearly the full gamut of the company’s services, from shell companies and bank-like entities to a virtual office, a professional looking website. He even flirted with a scheme to use shell companies to help Iranians obtain British citizenship.

In one 2010 email, Gharemani tells Formations House employee Oliver Hartmann that his is a registered company with three banks that is taking over credit card processing for one of those banks, First National Bank of Mexico, “so we are establishing office in US and Mexico.”

In another, he seeks help in finding deals where Iranians could get European Union visas in exchange for investment.

“Iran is a huge marked [sic] … They could achieve their residency in EU, but Spain has stopped issuing residency based on purchase of properties,” Ghahremani complained in an Oct. 24, 2011, email.

Yet another document showed Ghahremani discussing his seven properties in South Florida, where numerous companies bear his name in the state’s incorporation records.

Ghahremani kept addresses in Miami and the city of Malaga in southern Spain. He was charged in October 2015 in a DEA sting. He was held in Spain until extradited on Sept. 1, 2016, to the United States, where he later pleaded guilty and received a 66-month sentence in March 2018.

How Ghahremani went from a Miami real estate investor to would-be arms and drug smuggler is a story as murky as his offshore businesses. The Formations House documents show how the offshore services industry is used by those seeking to hide and camouflage their footsteps, as did Ghahremani, a boastful man with a penchant for secrets.

MONEYLESS MAN OF INTRIGUE?

Ghahremani was living in the United States on an investor visa. Federal prosecutors may not have known the full extent of his assets because of the services provided by Formations House. Despite requests for comment over a period of two weeks, the DEA would not discuss whether agents knew of his offshore activity and South Florida real estate. The government did not attempt to seize any assets, perhaps because his crime of conspiracy did not yield ill-gotten gains.

During sentencing, Ghahremani’s defense attorney, Alessandra DeBlasio, suggested the DEA lured into its sting a man with “significant mental and emotional frailties.” She described Ghahremani as a “a man full of bluster, a loud-mouth boaster and a name dropper, who told stories of gold spun from whole cloth, who in doing so wrote his own ticket to prison.”

As for his offshore assets, that’s the government’s job to determine, she said in a brief interview.

“Did they ever do an in-depth search for hidden assets? I don’t know, there was no discussion about that,” she said in the interview, adding it was not relevant to her defense of Ghahremani and “I certainly didn’t seek an investigation.”

Robert Feitel, Ghahremani’s initial attorney, declined to comment because he represented Ghahremani only briefly.

FLORI-DOUGH

Public records show that numerous properties in Florida are in the name of corporations that list Ghahremani and family members. And the trail of his offshore documents suggests he had money abroad. Some reference Switzerland, popular for its bank secrecy laws.

The Formations House documents show that Ghahremani created a company called Alfa Capital Group Limited in April 2009, far away in the Seychelles, a tax haven in the Indian Ocean.

That’s important.

Ghahremani had four companies with the Alfa name incorporated in Florida between 2012 and 2014. And Ghahremani’s then-wife, Yvonne Stam, and his stepchildren, Francisco Rodriguez and Melissa Rodriguez, all appear on some of the Alfa companies.

In fact, one real estate document filed in early 2018 with the Miami-Dade County clerk’s office, for the sale by Alfa Capital of a condo in Hialeah Gardens, has Francisco Rodriguez’s signature on it.

Another of Ghahremani’s Florida companies, Alfa Motors, shows Ghahremani’s stepson on the documents and he signed the papers to dissolve it, when Ghahremani was already in deep trouble. The address on that document is for a small lot for cars on Bird Road. At the time of sentencing, the stepson referenced it was failing and being sold.

The Florida companies share the Alfa name, and among the Formations House documents is an email from Ghahremani in which he describes himself as an investor in several distressed properties in Miami.

“The goal is purchasing distressed properties in Florida and Miami area. I have already purchased around 7 myself with my own money,” he wrote in an email on June 15, 2012.

In emails with Formations House employees, he shares his Miami phone number and discusses another Miami business with a partner where he invests in auctioned South Florida tax liens. He sends them a prospectus from a company called Gulf Group Holdings, suggesting he is a partner.

“Attached is part of a business plan I was working on, and will finish it off shortly GHH is my company with a partner,” he wrote to Formations House executives.

While providing the prospectus to Formations House, he refers to his company as GHH, even though the prospectus is for a company called GGH. It’s unclear if Ghahremani’s note simply had a typo or was a deliberate misrepresentation, but the brochure he provided to Formations House included the name Jonathan Politano.

“The name [Ghahremani] is not even slightly familiar to me,” said Politano, a South Florida businessman who owned GGH and at one time was the largest buyer of tax liens in the entire state of Florida.

Investors can purchase at auction a Florida homeowner’s delinquent tax debt with an assigned interest rate on it. If the debts aren’t paid off within two years, the holder of the tax lien can seize the house through foreclosure.

Shown Ghahremani’s brochure, Politano said it appeared to have lifted some of GGH’s past publicity.

ORPHANED BY PARTNERS

Ghahremani’s emails raise questions, many of which remain unanswered. Did those offshore businesses fund purchases of Miami real estate? What was the source of his investment money?

His stepson, Francisco Rodriguez, born in the Netherlands and now a Miami real estate specialist, declined to discuss his stepfather at length or the companies on which family members appear in Florida corporate documents.

“They are being dissolved,” he said in a brief phone conversation, declining to say anything about Ghahremani’s business ties with Formations House. “I have no knowledge of what you’re talking about.”

None of Ghahremani’s family members have been accused of wrongdoing and none appear in Formations House documents. His stepdaughter, Melissa Rodriguez, did not answer messages left at a Miami number for VIXI Gelataria, a Miami ice-cream parlor she co-founded. Yvonne Stam, Ghahremani’s wife at the time of his arrest and the mother of his grade-school daughter, did not return calls to her business in the Spanish resort city of Marbella.

In a letter to the judge at sentencing, she spoke fondly of him but cited “growing narcissim” for his downfall. Similarly, his stepson noted to the judge that after moving to Miami Ghahremani “idolized Italian mobster movies, martial-arts movies, and frequently impersonated movie characters.”

Ghahremani and Stam appear together on a company registered in Spain called Alfa Acquisitions SL.

Others who appear on Ghahremani companies in Florida claim to have little recollection of him.

Florida incorporation documents show that in February 2015, Ghahremani was involved in a joint-venture called Alfa SF Equity Group LLC with businessman Camilo Lopez.

When asked if he had ever discussed Russian or Iranian money with Ghahremani, Lopez, through his attorney, denied that he had.

“Mr. Lopez recalls only one direct interaction with Mr. Ghahremani, in probably 2014 or 2015, when Mr. Sanchez de Varona introduced Mr. Ghahremani as a potential purchaser of distressed properties,” said Gustavo J. Lamelas, Lopez’s attorney, in a statement to the Miami Herald and its parent, McClatchy.

Raul Sanchez de Varona partnered with Lopez in a company called The Solution Group Corp, which did real-estate development but also invested in tax liens. Through that company, together they partnered with Paragon Group to develop the swank Cassa Brickell.

Florida corporate documents show Ghahremani and his stepson, Rodriguez, as directors of CB 601, LLC, for a condo they’d purchased. Alfa Acquisitions, a Florida company on which Ghahremani first appeared alone but was reinstated in 2016 with his stepchildren as directors, transferred the property in June 2017 to CB 601, LLC., which is now in the name of Francisco Rodriguez.

“Mr. Lopez was not personally involved in the condominium purchase by CB 601, LLC,” said Lamelas, noting his client does know Rodriguez but has not done business with him. “Mr. Rodriguez was previously the stepson of Mr. Ghahremani, but Mr. Lopez understands that Mr. Rodriguez’s mother is no longer married to Mr. Ghahremani.”

Two lawyers who appeared on Ghahremani’s Florida documents did not return detailed voice messages requesting comment. Several others on his companies also did not return calls.

In a telephone interview, Sanchez said he had been introduced to Ghahremani through a real-estate agent and denied having any ties with him apart from being on documentation associated with a property purchase.

“He traveled. It was a matter of convenience that we’re there as a manager (on incorporation documents),” said Sanchez, recalling Ghahremani as “somewhat of a boastful person ... but he was not somebody I got to know very well.”

Was he surprised that his buyer is in prison?

“In today’s world, nothing really shocks you,” said Sanchez. “In my dealings with them, there was nothing that I ever saw that would have led me to believe any of this.”

Monika Leal in Miami contributed to this report..

This article was reported in collaboration with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

This story was originally published December 5, 2019 at 7:00 AM.