Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, right, with developer Rishi Kapoor at the launch of URBIN, Kapoor’s development project.
URBIN website
A once-rising developer who put Miami’s former mayor on his payroll was arrested by federal agents Friday on fraud charges, including swindling investors of millions of dollars.
Rishi Kapoor, who formerly lived in a waterfront estate in the Cocoplum neighborhood of Coral Gables, will have his first appearance in Miami federal court on Friday afternoon to face fraud and other charges stemming from his role as the chief executive officer of Location Ventures and its subsidiary URBIN. Both companies, before their collapse in 2023, developed and planned several mixed-use condo projects in Coral Gables, Miami and Miami Beach.
Details of Kapoor’s indictment are not yet publicly available because the case is still under seal.
Kapoor 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, has not been charged in the new federal case and has denied any wrongdoing.
Kapoor, 42, a University of Miami business 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 new federal criminal case. In the SEC case, Kapoor admitted liability in a consent judgment with the regulatory agency without admitting or denying its 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.
The SEC had filed suit against Kapoor in December 2023 and then obtained a federal judge’s order freezing his bank accounts and other properties to preserve his remaining assets to help pay back investors in his firm’s residential projects near downtown Coral Gables, Coconut Grove and Miami Beach. The judge also appointed a receiver to assume control of Location Ventures and its subsidiary, URBIN, and to liquidate its assets, a process that is still underway.
In an emergency motion to freeze his assets, the Miami-based SEC regional office said that Kapoor “shuffled investor funds” between different development projects and “misappropriated at least $6 million — $4.3 million of which Kapoor misappropriated for himself.”
SEC lawyers accused Kapoor of using Location Ventures and various other affiliates in a “scheme to defraud investors” while falsely claiming that he, his business partner and family members put $13 million of their own money into the umbrella company. The SEC, led by attorney Russell O’Brien, asserted that Kapoor sold “investment contracts” in individual projects that were actually “securities” subject to federal regulation, placing him in the agency’s cross-hairs.
The SEC also pointed out that Kapoor’s annual compensation wasn’t supposed to rise above $400,000 without the approval of Location Ventures’ board of directors. In 2022, according to the SEC, Kapoor paid himself $1,686,303 as compensation without board approval; the previous year, he also paid himself $629,600 without approval.
Calling his conduct as an executive “fraudulent,” SEC lawyers noted that during this period, Kapoor purchased a 2023 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.
An Instagram post by developer Rishi Kapoor’s URBIN Condos brand shows Miami Mayor Francis Suarez at the groundbreaking for a project in Coconut Grove. Company records show Kapoor had been paying Suarez $10,000 per month as a consultant. Instagram
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 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.
He told the Herald he was not immediately available for comment on Friday.
Suarez was subpoenaed in 2024 by the SEC to testify in Kapoor’s case about his relationship with the developer and his duties as a consultant for URBIN, 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, an Atlanta transplant, was forced out as the head of Location Ventures and URBIN. Suarez was not a target of the federal investigations.
.jpg)
Tess Riski covers Miami City Hall. She joined the Miami Herald in 2022 and has covered local politics throughout Miami-Dade County. She is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School’s Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism.
Jay Weaver writes about federal crime at the crossroads of South Florida and Latin America. Since joining the Miami Herald in 1999, he’s covered the federal courts nonstop, from Elian Gonzalez’s custody battle to Alex Rodriguez’s steroid abuse. He was part of the Herald teams that won the 2001 and 2022 Pulitzer Prizes for breaking news on Elian’s seizure by federal agents and the collapse of a Surfside condo building killing 98 people. He and three Herald colleagues were 2019 Pulitzer Prize finalists for explanatory reporting on gold smuggling between South America and Miami.