Already fighting criminal charges that she used stolen COVID relief funds to win a seat in Congress, Florida Democrat Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick now faces accusations in Washington of an entirely separate campaign-finance scheme involving “shell companies,” local mayors and hundreds of thousands of dollars in oil money.

The latest allegations, detailed in a House Ethics Committee report, accuse the congresswoman’s team and family of soliciting more than $800,000 from a politically-connected Haitian oil company to secretly boost her 2022 reelection campaign.

The oil company, PetroGaz-Haiti S.A., funneled “impermissible corporate contributions” to Cherfilus-McCormick, the House Ethics Committee wrote, and the congresswoman’s closest advisers and husband set up “shell companies to conceal the source of the funds used to make significant expenditures for the benefit of” her campaign.

The allegations shed new light on Cherfilus-McCormick’s efforts to become the first Haitian-American from Florida in Congress. According to a federal indictment and the House ethics investigation, she used illegal funds to capture and keep the seat.

The congresswoman last week pleaded not guilty to federal charges that she used a $5 million overpayment to her health care company from the state of Florida to present herself to voters as a successful, self-funded businesswoman en route to a win in a 2021 special election — squeaking by in the Democratic primary by just five votes. Within weeks of being sworn in, the ethics report states, she and her advisers found a new way to illegally fund her re-election.

Cherfilus-McCormick has summarily rejected the 27 misconduct allegations in the ethics report, including money laundering related to the PetroGaz-Haiti funds. She is set to go before a House ethics panel on March 5 for a public hearing, which is rare in House ethics investigations.

“The report is being deliberately misconstrued and mischaracterized, with a substantial amount of information left out to manufacture a particular narrative,” Cherfilus-McCormick said in a statement to the Miami Herald. “This is not about accountability, it’s a numbers game and a fight for the seat. Republicans are weaponizing the ethics process to steal the seat.”

Secret shareholders

The ethics report, published following more than two dozen witness interviews and a review of 33,000 documents, traces hundreds of thousands of dollars in alleged spending to support Cherfilus-McCormick’s reelection campaign back to its source: the Haitian government.

According to the ethics report, the congresswoman’s relationship with PetroGaz-Haiti began in late April 2022, after North Miami Beach Mayor Michael Joseph arranged a meet-and-greet between Cherfilus-McCormick and the company’s owner. The committee said its investigators “received evidence” that Joseph arranged that meeting, but did not provide further details.

Four days later, Petrogaz-Haiti or its owner — the report is unclear — wrote the first in a string of checks that totaled $810,000 to a political organization chaired by Joseph. The organization turned around and gave most of those funds to a separate, now-defunct group that helped fund the congresswoman’s 2022 campaign without disclosing its spending, according to House investigators.

PetroGaz-Haiti only had one source of income at the time: $12.5 million from the Ministry of Economy and Finance of Haiti, according to the report.

In the U.S., PetroGaz-Haiti S.A. is registered to Broward County voter Frederic Elusma, according to Florida corporate filings. Its website is no longer functional, though the company remains an active Florida corporation. Elusma — who is the registered owner of another oil company called NABI Energy Holdings, with a head office in Trinidad — did not respond to requests for comment. A Herald reporter also visited a Hallandale Beach condominium where he’s listed and left a message for him.

In Haiti, PetroGaz-Haiti S.A. is a politically-connected public limited company, locally known as a Societe Anonyme. Its shareholders are secret, but it counts among them former Haitian Sen. Rony Célestin.

Célestin told the Herald he doesn’t know anything about Elusma’s payments and doesn’t have any relationship with the congresswoman.

“Fred is in Miami, and I am in Haiti. I don’t really know the transactions he is doing,” said Célestin. “If he’s given a check, perhaps it’s on his own for his own lobbying, but not on behalf of PetroGaz.”

Célestin said Elusma is president of PetroGaz and disbanded the company in 2020. The former senator had publicly claimed PetroGaz-Haiti as the source of his wealth in the New York Times in July 2021, nine months before Cherfilus-McCormick met Elusma, according to the report. Célestin was later sanctioned by the U.S. government in 2022 for drug trafficking and was charged in Haiti in the killing of a Haitian journalist two years ago. He’s denied wrongdoing.

Célestin’s name does not appear in any of the company’s corporate filings in Florida. He defended PetroGaz-Haiti, S.A., as a legitimate company with six shareholders, whom he declined to name. The $12.5 million payment was payment they were owed by the Haitian state after selling the government heavy fuel on credit, he said.

“Whatever profit he’s made in PetroGaz, he can do whatever he wants with it,” he added, also noting that if Elusma was giving money, he should have done so in his name because the “company doesn’t have any contracts in the U.S. and doesn’t need any lobbying.”

The company currently has no fuel contracts and is still owed about $9 million from the Haitian government for fuel, said Célestin.

At the time of the interactions between Elusma and Cherfilus-McCormick, Célestin and other members of Haiti’s political and business elite were under increased scrutiny by the Biden administration due to the worsening gang violence that surged after the July 7, 2021, assassination of Haiti’s president, Jovenel Moise.

The sanctions against Célestin came two months after the congresswoman sent a letter to then-President Joe Biden in October 2022, asking Biden to sanction “known perpetrators” that were “financing the insecurity” in Haiti, though she did not name anyone specific.

Local mayors linked to allegations

The ethics committee does not address PetroGaz Haiti’s ownership or suggest any potential influence on Cherfilus-McCormick’s tenure in Congress. It does tie the congresswoman’s relationship with the company to two mayors — Joseph, the North Miami Beach mayor and attorney, and North Miami Mayor Alix Desulme — as well as local political consultant Mark Goodrich.

Throughout 2022, the report states, PetroGaz-Haiti donated a total of $810,000 to a newly formed, tax-exempt political organization called Progressive People Inc. Joseph was the organization’s president. The congresswoman’s husband, Corlie McCormick, was vice president.

The funds from PetroGaz-Haiti made up 89% of Progressive People Inc.’s income that year, according to the Ethics Committee. That was the only year the organization brought in more than $5,000 in revenue, tax filings show.

The report alleges that Progressive People Inc. transferred most of that money — $725,000 — to a now-dissolved “shell company,” called Truth & Justice Inc., which then made unreported spending in the congresswoman’s 2022 campaign. The group also received about $144,000 from bank accounts linked to the congresswoman and her brother, according to the report.

Citing bank records, the Ethics Committee said Truth & Justice then paid more than $824,000 to “vendors, entities, and individuals who also provided services” to the congresswoman’s campaign — including more than $150,000 for mailers for the campaign that were never reported.

At least some of those funds were solicited through letters sent to Joseph by Goodrich, who was unofficially managing the congresswoman’s campaign, according to details laid out in previous Ethics Committee reports.

Goodrich received at least $34,000 from Truth & Justice in 2022 and a political committee that Goodrich controlled received $177,000, according to investigators. Goodrich did not respond to a request for comment.

Truth & Justice Inc. described its purpose in its Florida incorporation records as a 501(c)(4) — a type of political organization that can spend in support or against candidates, but hits contribution limits if it directly coordinates with a campaign.

But Truth & Justice never registered as a political committee with state or federal regulators and no disclosures about “spending or fundraising were ever made to either entity,” according to the ethics committee.

Truth & Justice has since been administratively dissolved in Florida for failing to file its annual corporate filings. The company’s registered agent, Gary Eugene Beasley, hung up when reached by phone by the Herald. Truth & Justice’s director, unnamed in the report, testified to the ethics committee’s investigators that the fund “was just created to have a checks and balance of the campaign funds.”

Unlike Truth & Justice, Progressive People Inc. remains an active, registered political organization that has kept up with federal not-for-profit filings. Still, the ethics committee called both organizations “shell companies” created to hide the true source of the funds from PetroGaz-Haiti.

Joseph, who was a North Miami Beach commissioner at the time and president of Progressive People Inc., declined to comment on the details of the report or on PetroGaz-Haiti, but defended the congresswoman and praised her for “working hard for her constituents in a truly difficult time” in a statement.

“She deserves her day in court,” Joseph said. “I believe she is being unfairly targeted because one seat makes a difference for which political party controls the U.S. House of Representatives.”

Her district includes parts of Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach and is the most heavily Democratic district in the state, according to the Cook Political Report.

Neither Corlie McCormick nor Chantrell McCormick, the other two officers for Progressive People Inc., responded to requests for comment. Corlie McCormick, the congresswoman’s husband, testified to House investigators that he didn’t know where Progressive People Inc. was getting its money — only that it had hundreds of thousands of dollars.

There are separate allegations in the report that her campaign improperly coordinated spending with two political committees focused on outreach to Haitian-American voters, both run by North Miami Mayor Alix Desulme, who declined to comment.

Part of that spending included $40,000 from PetroGaz-Haiti to Haitian American Votes PAC, run by Desulme, for a swearing-in for the congresswoman in January 2023, after her general election victory.

The congresswoman has given no indication she plans to resign from Congress as she heads toward a public ethics hearing next month. She has maintained that the “full facts will make clear I did nothing wrong.”

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