Ex-adviser to Mayagüez mayor pleads guilty in fraud case
By The Star Staff
A former adviser to Mayagüez Mayor José Guillermo Rodríguez, identified as Roberto Mejill Tellado, is the first defendant to plead guilty at the federal level in a $9 million fraud scheme involving public funds in the western coastal municipality.
According to the indictment, Mejill Tellado, owner of the company RWM Consultants Inc., and also former advisers Eugenio García Jiménez and Arnaldo Jerónimo Irizarry Irizarry, as well as the former executive director of the Mayagüez Economic Development Inc. (MEDI), Alejandro Riera Fernández, and two other individuals, conspired to defraud the municipality when they took the $9 million in public funds and allegedly invested it, but actually diverted it for their own use.
In Mejill Tellado’s case, the statement says he would have obtained an illegal profit of $444,000, according to a NotiCel report.