The 37-year-old Lomena hoped to get a fair shake in court. He’d emigrated from Venezuela after high school with a sense that the United States had a more just legal system.
In a letter to the Florida judge, he pointed to a recent extension of the nationwide moratorium on evictions during the coronavirus outbreak and asked for more time to pay his overdue rent.
“I do not have a place to go,” Lomena wrote, “nor the money to move into a new apartment.”
His landlord—a holding company formed by real estate firms in Miami and Iowa—wasn’t moved by his pleas. The company pressed the court to evict him and, in early February, the judge ruled that Lomena hadn’t filed the right form to prevent his eviction. Within days, during the height of the pandemic, the Broward County Sheriff’s Office posted a large notice in bold red letters on his door ordering Lomena to vacate his home at the Axis at One Pine complex within 24 hours or be arrested for trespassing.
Lomena’s building is among a growing number of apartment complexes and single-family homes owned by massive corporate landlords who in some cases hold thousands of properties across the country and draw on pools of money from wealthy investors around the world.
A trove of leaked documents reviewed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and 150 media partners show that Lomena’s building had unusual, and controversial, investors: offshore trusts holding hundreds of millions of dollars for the Legion of Christ, a wealthy Roman Catholic order disgraced by an international pedophilia scandal.
The confidential records show that the trusts became a secret partner in the ownership structure of Lomena’s apartment complex, working with the landlord to invest $2 million in the complex in 2015. The trusts invested millions more in other modest residential buildings in Florida, Texas, Iowa, Indiana, and Illinois.
High-profile Legion of Christ operatives began quietly setting up one of a trio of New Zealand trusts designed to hold money for the Legion soon after the Vatican announced in 2010 that it would seize the operations of the troubled order and launch a new investigation, according to leaked records.
Two of these trusts, formed shortly after, secretly moved millions of dollars around the world. This included more than $14 million funneled into investments in apartment complexes that Pensam Capital, the firm that owned Lomena’s building, was acquiring across the United States. In comments to ICIJ, Pensam said it has not received information indicating it has received investments from the Legion.
These two trusts would come to hold nearly $300 million in assets devoted to the Legion of Christ, according to leaked records, at a time when victims of sexual abuse by its priests were seeking financial compensation from the order through lawsuits and through a commission overseen by the Vatican.
In response to questions about whether the Legion disclosed the trusts to the Vatican, the order told ICIJ that “religious institutes do not have an obligation to send detailed information to the Vatican regarding their internal financial decisions or organization.”
In statements to ICIJ, the Legion acknowledged it had set up one of the three trusts, but distanced itself from the other two, which held the majority of the funds designated for the Legion. The Legion said it had no knowledge of the other two trusts’ operations. The two trusts were funded by scions of a prominent industrialist family in Mexico, including Father Luis Garza Medina, one of the Legion’s top leaders. A spokesperson responding to ICIJ’s questions for Garza said that Garza has no control over the trusts.
A review of leaked documents by ICIJ shows deep connections to the Legion in all three trusts, which share the same New Zealand address and have the same trustees managing them.
The spokesperson for Garza said the secret trusts were strictly charitable and devoted to the support of elderly priests and other Catholic causes, and that the trusts have made only charitable distributions.
The leaked documents are part of the Pandora Papers, the millions of secret files at the heart of a global investigation by ICIJ and its media partners, including the Miami Herald, the BBC, The Washington Post, L’Espresso in Italy, El Pais in Spain, and the Mexican publications Quinto Elemento Lab and Proceso. The records involving the Legion of Christ come from Asiaciti Trust, a Singapore-based corporate services provider that helped administer the New Zealand trusts.
