July is when the elected officials and constitutional officers of the City of Miami are required to reveal to the public some annual bare bones explanation of their financial standing after another year of handling public money.

Two annual reports are filed, one is called a FORM 1: Statement Of Financial Interests and the other is called the Public Disclosure Of Financial Interest.

These annual reports are actually sorry examples of what passes for transparency when it comes to the public's ability of keeping track of what these people might be up to financially while in public office, but since the reporting  requirements were created by the politicians themselves, it's pretty much an accounting process predicated on the premise that the crooks are honor bound to tell you if they abuse their public trust by cashing in while in office.

Of course, if, and/or when they do the minimum requirements they are required to comply with are sometimes enough to get a peak behind the curtain, and that's what happened last year when I first broke the story that Francis Suarez and his wife had purchased a $1,450,000 house in the South Grove, and had put down $309,000 as a downpayment and closing costs.

As part of my story I relied on Suarez's annual reports that showed that just before the purchase he had $214,750 in a savings account, and $23,795 in a checking account.

My question at the time, which could not be answered until Suarez filed his latest financial reports two weeks ago, was whether he had cashed in the $214,750 in his savings account to cover part of the $309,000 down payment.

Here are first pages Suarez's two financial reports from last year.

Copyrighted:  2011,2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019

Below are Suarez's latest financial reports filed on June 26th of this year.

Notice first that unlike last year, he doesn't reveal whether the $15,792.19 is in a savings or checking account like he did the previous year, but only that is in a  City National Bank account.

On first glance, that might leave a casual observer to assume that he no longer had a savings account. That in turn could lead to an inference that the $214,750 from last year's saving's account went towards the $309,000 down payment.

Another bad habit that seems to have started occurring since Colonel Klink has become the City Manager is his use of social media to promote specific businesses, like restaurants he eats at.

If he was doing this as a private citizen, there would be no problem, but he's doing this on what is clearly his City Manager Twitter page, and with the imprimatur of his official position.

Since most folks don't know the existence, or ever see these annual financial reports, the chances are pretty slim that average folks wouldn't know that there are 2 separate reports, and that you have to look closely at both of these reports because the details - what few there are - sometime gets lost between them.

If you look at Suarez's FORM 1 for this year, on the 2nd page under Part D, you will find that Suarez does in fact still have a savings account with US Century Bank.

What he failed to do was to repeat the same format that he used last year in reporting on the amount of money he has in this savings account so as to provide an apples to apples comparison.

I don't think that this failure was either an oversight, or just an innocent difference in the way that he chose to fill out these forms this year.  

A decision to shield the amount of money that he has in his savings account - something he would have had to reveal if he had followed the process he used last year - would probably reveal that he still has a lot of money in this savings account, and therefore would continue to fuel the question of where did he get the $309,000 for the down payment on his new house.

He has no other real reason for shielding the amount in his savings account, because if anything, a sizable reduction in this saving account would support a claim that he didn't take money from questionable sources to finance the purchase of this $1.45 million house.

This year's report is also interesting because Suarez claims that the house that he and his wife originally lived in in Coral Gate went from being his primary home valued at $320,575, to an investment property now valued at $550,000.

It's true that real estate values in Miami sometimes fluctuate, but a $230,000 increase in value of a 1949 house in Coral Gate seems a bit much.  For you real estate folks, here's the address:  1671 SW 32 Place.

The one thing that hasn't changed is that Suarez seems to be skating close to the edge of financial peril because he seems to have tapped an additional $80,000 in equity from this house, and now claims to owe $440,000.  

Last year he claimed he owed $360,000, which, when you also factor in the $131,637 he owes on another investment condo means that he's carrying  a debt load of $1,742, 278.41, on a salary of $97,000 he gets for being Miami's part-time mayor, and whatever compensation he gets from the law firm Greenspoon Marder for being "of counsel."

The last little wrinkle in this year's report is the claim that he got a loan of $40,000 from Daddy Xavier.  There's no way to even begin to assess what this loan represents, but I suspect that Xavier will probably weigh in on Twitter with his version of why he "loaned" his son $40,000.  

The big issue though is Suarez's attempt to play rope-a-dope by failing to account for how much money he has in his saving's account.

At the end of the day, none of the financial numbers provided by Francis Suarez in his latest financial reporting provides an answer to my original question:

WHERE DID FRANCIS SUAREZ GET THE $309,000 FOR THE DOWN PAYMENT AND CLOSING COSTS FOR HIS HOUSE IN THE SOUTH GROVE!

It's Miami, Bitches!