A Miami mansion worth millions found belonging to the daughter of the mayor of Ternopil

A Miami mansion worth millions found belonging to the daughter of the mayor of Ternopil

In September 2022, the information space of Ternopil was shaken by the news that the 26-year-old daughter of the mayor of this 220-thousand western Ukrainian city, Serhiy Nadal, had acquired a mansion in Miami for 1 870 000 dollars.

In fact, this was not just news — it was a large-scale journalistic investigation by the local online outlet Politerno, which covered not only the expensive mansion of the mayor’s sole heir. The case revealed details of public importance for a country at war, which the investigative author reports in the piece. In conditions of ongoing confrontation between the Center and local authorities, when Bankova, using prohibited tools, removes mayors from office and tries to reach into local budgets, one must learn to distinguish political pressure from a real fight against corruption by the anti-corruption bloc.

Summary of the investigation

The story of this investigation began with Anastasiia Nadal’s studies at the elite Swiss hospitality university Glion and her move in the summer of 2018 from the shores of Lake Geneva to an internship in Miami. The investigation traced a line from the daughter of the mayor’s first rented apartments in the center of the United States’ resort gem to the townhouse purchased in the name of her future husband in the Pembroke Pines area for almost 250 thousand dollars.

The young man Anastasiia Nadal fell in love with while working at The St. Regis Bal Harbour Resort did not have the means to buy such real estate. At that time, the elder son of Latin American immigrants, Ruben James Rodriguez, lived in a very modest house with his parents, studied at a low-cost university, and worked part-time at the reception of the mentioned hotel. Ruben’s mother had worked for years as a saleswoman in the Latin American Grill cafeteria in their neighborhood. After registering their marriage in December 2019 and holding a wedding in January 2020, Ruben Rodriguez made his wife Anastasiia Rodriguez a co-owner of the said townhouse.

The wedding of the new American family is a separate chapter of the investigation. Ruben’s relatives were brought from Florida to Ukraine so that, together with Serhiy Nadal’s elite guests, they could celebrate the wedding in style at the prestigious Edem Resort Medical & SPA in the Lviv region. Present at this closed luxury event were officials from the mayor of Ternopil’s inner circle as well as the wealthiest businessmen of the Ternopil region — the owner of the road-construction company Techno-Bud-Center, Andriy Yarema, and the founder of the construction company Kreator-Bud, Ihor Huda.

At the end of 2021, the young family sold the mentioned townhouse for 300 thousand dollars. Just three months later, a few days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they purchased the mansion mentioned at the start of the article in one of Miami’s most prestigious neighborhoods — Coral Gables in Miami-Dade County. Only the price of the new property in no way matches the proceeds from the sale of the previous home — it amounts to 1 870 000 dollars. To buy the elite estate, the Rodriguez family had to add to the townhouse sale proceeds, no less than, more than one and a half million dollars.

But those were not the only costly expenses of the happy newlyweds in 2022. In early summer 2022, Ruben Rodriguez became the owner of the security company City Watch Protective Services, which since 1992 has provided unarmed and armed security services for hotels, luxury condominiums, apartment and residential buildings in the state of Florida. The company holds the appropriate license and has been known in Miami under that name since 2009. This is a fairly profitable business that can generate million-dollar revenues for its owners.

The facts described above were proven based on extracts from official U.S. registries and insider information from local lawyers. Immediately after the material was published, the mayor of Ternopil posted a refutation on his Facebook page, calling the investigation “lying and fake.”

At the end of 2022 I contacted the Florida Department of State to obtain registry extracts and apostilles for these documents. The documents were prepared and sent to Ukraine this summer. Separately, an extract from the Florida voter registry was obtained regarding the registration at the mansion’s address of Anastasiia Rodriguez’s husband, Ruben James Rodriguez, as a voter of the Republican Party. Previously I did not have these data, and therefore they became final and indisputable for proving that the daughter of the mayor of Ternopil officially owns a mansion worth almost two million dollars.

And if it is proven that Anastasiia Rodriguez (Nadal) owns this property, then one hundred percent the fact can be asserted that she purchased in 16 February 2023 apartments in the Wind condominium in downtown Miami for 380 thousand dollars. After all, it was the mansion at 7300 SW 77TH AVE that Anastasiia Rodriguez listed as the mailing address when buying the apartments in Wind.

According to my information, on the eve of both purchases the mayor of Ternopil, Serhiy Nadal, visited his daughter in Miami. According to the same sources, Anastasiia Nadal received the mentioned apartments from her father as a gift for the birth of a grandson.

The mayor of Ternopil decided not to respond to the publication of the new data. But this time the continuation of last year’s investigation was noticed by the National Agency on Corruption Prevention, which launched a check to “establish the conformity of the standard of living of Serhiy Nadal and members of his family with their property and declared incomes.”

Reaction of NACP and other anti-corruption bodies

After the second part of the investigation was published, the National Agency on Corruption Prevention requested that the State Financial Monitoring Service of Ukraine further verify Anastasiia Rodriguez’s accounts through financial monitoring with the United States. A request was also sent to the FBI for the same purpose. Separate inquiries were made to U.S. border and customs services regarding border crossings by the mayor of Ternopil. All this became known from the words of an NACP employee with whom communication took place in the course of establishing the circumstances of the possible crime.

It should be noted that the National Anti-Corruption Bureau initially distanced itself from this case. The materials it had were forwarded to the NACP, which in turn awaited certain procedural steps to be taken by its colleagues at the Bureau.

So we took another route — we filed a crime report with the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office. Recently, a response was received from the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine regarding the registration of proceedings on 11 October 2023. The legal qualification — article 368-5 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine “Illegal enrichment.” The pre-trial investigation is being conducted by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine.

Why it is necessary to distinguish pressure from authorities on local self-government and the real fight of the anti-corruption bloc against corruption

The past year has been extremely difficult for local self-government in Ukraine. The central government is exerting unprecedented pressure on mayors, and in recent months it has also begun the process of depriving local budgets of income from military personal income tax.

The investigations and removals from office of the mayors of Chernihiv and Rivne, the decapitation of Zaporizhzhia and Poltava, the constant pressure on Kyiv’s head Vitali Klitschko, the recent searches of Andriy Baloga — all these are not random links in a single chain. One should by no means harbor illusions about the sinlessness of the mentioned mayors. But in most of the described cases there is a persistent sense of deliberate actions aimed at weakening and disciplining inconvenient city heads ahead of potential presidential and parliamentary elections in the spring of 2024, an unofficial start to which was signaled by President Zelensky in his comments about running.

At the same time, leaders of cities with an explicitly pro-government stance somehow encounter no problems even in situations far more scandalous and criminal than the Chernihiv or Rivne cases. This trend is very noticeable today, and therefore law enforcement, especially those who maintain maximum independence from the Office of the President, must make maximum efforts so that citizens believe in the purity of their intentions regarding the prosecution of local self-government representatives.

Thus the “Miami” case of the mayor of Ternopil described in this material can become that litmus test for the independence of NABU and the SAP, about which so much public discussion has taken place recently. After all, Serhiy Nadal is confidently called in Ternopil’s political circles a mayor within the orbit of the Office of the President.

Numerous violations in construction works in Ternopil, to which the city council does not respond; violations in issuing urban development conditions and restrictions for construction; in some places simply illegally erected buildings (multi-apartment buildings instead of private homesteads); a systematic issuance of free land plots to “needed people” for homesteads and garages, on which later retail outlets and office centers spring up; massive manipulations and violations in public procurement — all this is accompanied by reports of crimes, complaints from Ternopil residents, and an absence of any reaction from law enforcement. And interestingly, even from an independent NABU.

Strangely, in March 2021 the High Anti-Corruption Court was forced to oblige the National Anti-Corruption Bureau to investigate possible abuses by the mayor of Ternopil, Serhiy Nadal, after the bureau failed to enter information into the Unified Register of Pre-Trial Investigations on a complaint about criminal offenses by the mayor, provided for by articles 191 (misappropriation, embezzlement of property, or appropriation by abuse of office), 211 (issuing regulatory acts that reduce budget revenues or increase budget expenditures contrary to law), 364 (abuse of power or official position) of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. In 2019 the same year, NABU again refused to open a criminal proceeding regarding Serhiy Nadal and local police officials on the basis of possible commission of a number of crimes.

Under suspicious circumstances, the mayor of Ternopil managed to avoid responsibility in the “garbage” case that erupted in August 2020 after Politerno’s investigative report “The Garbage Scam of the Decade: the company Serhiy Nadal brought to Malashivka is massively accepting waste from neighboring regions.” According to available data, the State Bureau of Investigation handled the case, which central media attribute to the influence of Oleg Tatarov, deputy head of the Office of the President. Moreover, according to Politerno, it was in this case that the first “understanding” communication between Bankova and the mayor of Ternopil occurred ahead of the local elections.

Serhiy Nadal’s well-known partnership relations with the head of the Ternopil Regional Military Administration, Volodymyr Trush, are also noteworthy. It was after the “deployment” of the Rohatyn tax official to Ternopil in March 2020 that talk began about a “new roof” for the city mayor from the central government. Political circles immediately spread information about the long-standing friendly relations of the new regional head with Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, with whom he had worked in their native Ivano-Frankivsk region. The way Serhiy Nadal began to act brazenly and with impunity, especially during the war, only added weight to suspicions of an “indulgence” from Kyiv.

So, in the case of the illegal enrichment of the mayor of Ternopil, Serhiy Nadal, NABU and SAP have an excellent opportunity to prove that they are indeed anti-corruption bodies independent of the authorities. Especially since the case involves checking accounts in the United States, with which the Bureau has established close cooperation. Recently a delegation headed by the director of NABU, Semen Kryvonos, his deputy Hizo Uglava, and the head of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, Oleksandr Klymenko, visited the United States. One of the key topics during meetings with White House administration representatives was discussing strengthening the independence of Ukraine’s anti-corruption system, as well as problems that arise in this area.

Well then, the ball is in the anti-corruption officials’ court — we’ll watch and root for them…