Miami developer Rishi Kapoor admits guilt and promises to repay victims. Can he?

Rishi Kapoor, who just a few years ago appeared to be a rising star in Miami-Dade County’s development scene, pleaded guilty on Friday to a pair of money-laundering and payroll-tax conspiracy charges stemming from a federal indictment accusing him of directing an $89 million fraud scheme.

Kapoor, who was arrested in early March and held in a detention facility, faces 10 years or more in prison at his sentencing this summer. He also will be ordered to pay back more than $70 million to his real estate companies’ investment victims and outstanding taxes to the Internal Revenue Service.

His initial 37-count indictment accused him of swindling investors of tens of millions of dollars, lying to financial institutions to obtain funds to buy a luxury yacht and failing to pay millions in personal and payroll taxes.

“It’s part of my daily prayer that everybody who is not paid back I will make it my life’s work to pay back,” Kapoor told Magistrate Judge Marty Fulgueira Elfenbein at his plea hearing in Miami federal court. “This is a mission of mine that I want to make to the government and the court.”

But it’s unlikely that Kapoor will be able to make good on his promise. A receiver in a parallel Securities and Exchange Commission case has been selling off the real estate assets of his former companies, Coral Gables-based Location Ventures and URBIN, which both collapsed in 2023. But those sales have generated only millions of dollars in equity to repay investors because of heavy debts owed to lenders, according to court records.

Kapoor, who formerly lived in a waterfront estate in the Cocoplum neighborhood of Coral Gables, was unable to obtain a bond after a magistrate judge and federal judge found him to be a flight risk. His trial before U.S. District Judge Michael Moore was scheduled for Monday, putting pressure on him to cut a plea deal to limit his potential prison sentence if jurors convicted him.

After recently failing to obtain a five-month continuance of his trial, Kapoor’s defense lawyers — Don Samuel, Jane Raskin and Fred Schwartz — quickly pivoted to working out the plea deal with federal prosecutors.

In late March, Kapoor pleaded not guilty to charges stemming from his role as the chief executive officer of Coral Gables-based Location Ventures and its subsidiary URBIN. Both companies developed and planned a dozen mixed-use condo and single-family home projects in Coral Gables, Miami and Miami Beach.

Also in late March, Kapoor’s former right-hand man at Location Ventures, Daniel Motha, was charged with conspiring to defraud the U.S. government by concealing and diverting the company’s payroll taxes owed to the IRS. Motha, 42, of Pinecrest, a former chief financial officer who had attended college with Kapoor, is expected to plead guilty on June 23 and faces up five years in prison, according to court records.

Kapoor was arrested at a hotel in Fort Lauderdale on March 6 on what happened to be his 42nd birthday. The developer gained notoriety in 2023 when the Miami Herald broke a story revealing that he had hired then-Miami Mayor Francis Suarez as a $10,000-a-month consultant for URBIN while the company was developing a major project in Coconut Grove. Suarez, whose second term as mayor ended in 2025, is not charged in the new federal case and has denied any wrongdoing.

The indictment, filed by prosecutors Elizabeth Young and Daya Nathan, included charges for money laundering, bank fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government and various tax violations.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Florida said that while Kapoor raised about $89 million from investors, most of his promised real estate projects were never built. Despite being entitled to a capped salary of $400,000 plus certain fees, Kapoor diverted substantially more funds for personal use, including the purchase of a 68-foot yacht and a residence in Cocoplum.

Prosecutors further alleged that Kapoor misrepresented to investors the amount that he had personally contributed to Location Ventures, claiming he and his business partner and family had invested $13 million, when, in reality, they contributed roughly half of that amount. He was also accused of deceiving escrow agents to secure the release of pre-construction condominium deposits and then misappropriated those funds for personal expenses unrelated to the developments. As a result, condominium projects in Coconut Grove and Miami Beach were never built.

Prosecutors also alleged that Kapoor withheld payroll taxes from employees but failed to turn that money over to the government, effectively stealing from his own employees. Instead of remitting those taxes to the IRS, prosecutors alleged Kapoor diverted over $2 million from company accounts for his personal benefit.

Kapoor pleaded guilty to a conspiracy to defraud the United States for failing to remit his employees’ payroll taxes between 2020 and 2022. (He also did not file personal income-tax returns for the years 2019-2023, according to the indictment. He is required to resolve his tax obligations with the IRS.)

Kapoor also pleaded guilty to one money-laundering charge accusing him of transferring $820,559 from his personal bank account as a down payment on a $5 million purchase of a 68-foot Princess yacht on Aug. 15, 2022.

SEC alleged Kapoor ‘shuffled investor funds’

Kapoor, a University of Miami business-school and law-school graduate, was under investigation by the FBI, IRS and U.S. Attorney’s Office for more than two years. In November 2024, he reached a settlement agreement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to resolve a lawsuit claiming he defrauded dozens of investors in his companies’ projects. That civil case is still unresolved, however, as both sides have failed to reach an agreement on how much Kapoor must compensate those investors.

The SEC case underscores the charges in the federal criminal case. In the SEC case, Kapoor admitted liability in a consent judgment with the regulatory agency without admitting or denying allegations that he misappropriated $4.3 million for himself while raising about $93 million from more than 50 investors in his South Florida real estate projects.

According to the agreement, Kapoor was barred for five years from serving as an officer or director of any company that sells security investments.

Calling his conduct as an executive “fraudulent,” SEC lawyers noted that Kapoor used the ill-gotten money to purchase the 68-foot Princess yacht for more than $5 million, bought a marina slip at the Cocoplum Yacht Club for $695,000, leased a 2020 600LT Spider McLaren sports car and paid a private chef $10,000 a month. Kapoor, who is married, also bought a waterfront home in the exclusive Cocoplum area of Coral Gables for $6 million — one of several assets that he was forced to sell to pay back lenders and investors, according to a judge’s order.

Notably absent from the SEC’s motion to freeze Kapoor’s assets and its civil complaint was any mention of his hiring Suarez as a consultant for URBIN while the Location Ventures affiliate was seeking approval from City Hall for a residential and retail project at Commodore Plaza in Coconut Grove. Suarez, featured in the Miami Herald investigative series “Shakedown City,” was not mentioned at all.

URBIN ended up paying Suarez more than $200,000 from July 2021 through at least March 2023, according to corporate records and sources familiar with the payments. In the past, Suarez has maintained that, as a consultant for URBIN, he did not use his mayoral office to help Kapoor or his development company on permitting issues before the city of Miami.

Suarez was subpoenaed in 2024 by the SEC to testify in Kapoor’s case about his relationship with the developer and his URBIN consultant duties, which involved raising funds from potential investors. His statement to the SEC was not included in the court record.

The regulatory agency’s civil investigation of Kapoor was first reported in June 2023 by the Herald in a story that also revealed the FBI was examining his relationship with Suarez in the parallel criminal probe. The following month, Kapoor was forced out as the head of Location Ventures and URBIN. Suarez was not a target of the federal investigations.

In addition, Kapoor also had similar dealings with a top politician in Coral Gables.

The Herald reported in August 2023 that a politically connected real estate brokerage tied to Coral Gables Mayor Vince Lago received a $640,000 commission in 2022 from the sale of a downtown Gables lot where Kapoor planned to build a luxury high-rise.

The payment, disclosed in corporate documents obtained by the Herald, came in December 2022 as Kapoor’s Location Ventures scrambled to close on the $35.5 million purchase of the property, located at 1505 Ponce de Leon Blvd.

The commission went to Rosa Commercial Real Estate, a boutique brokerage owned by Lago’s business associate, former Hialeah Councilman Oscar De La Rosa.

State records list only five real estate agents whose licenses are registered with the brokerage. They included then-Hialeah Mayor Esteban “Steve” Bovo Jr., Lago and his chief of staff at Coral Gables City Hall. Lago says he received no money from the deal and was not involved in the sale of the property to Location Ventures.

But Lago’s decision to join Rosa Commercial Real Estate in 2022 — and to quietly remain involved in the developer’s affairs at City Hall in the ensuing months — raised questions about how the brokerage became connected to the deal and the extent to which the mayor entangled his private business and public office with Kapoor.

State records show that Lago joined the small firm that would ultimately profit from Location Ventures’ purchase of the 1505 Ponce development site as Kapoor was seeking City Commission approval to build a 16-story residential tower there.

Weeks earlier, in late May of 2022, Lago and several associates had purchased a storefront directly across the street and then leased it to Location Ventures as a future sales center for roughly $12,400 a month.

As the Herald previously reported, Lago said he and his partners were “approached by several potential tenants,” and the developer’s attorney said the company paid market rate.

The mayor disclosed the arrangement when he recused himself in 2022 from the first of several City Commission votes on the project, noting on June 28 of that year that he had a “potential conflict.” Two days later, state records show, Lago registered his real estate license with Rosa Commercial Real Estate.

Miami Herald Staff Writer Tess Riski contributed to this report.

This story was originally published May 15, 2026 at 1:15 PM.