By the time former Economic Development Secretary Sebastián Negrón Reichard resigned and alleged that the governor’s office had pressured the Office of Permit Management (OGPe in Spanish) to award a contract to the company JJ Investment Group, another agency had already received a similar instruction, several sources outside the Department of Natural and Environmental Resources told the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (CPI).

JJ Investment Group, led by José José Pabón Castrodad, was hired to coordinate a multiday meeting on coral conservation. The U.S. Coral Reef Task Force event, which would bring together scientists, marine and fisheries conservationists, federal officials and representatives of organizations to discuss progress on coral conservation and restoration initiatives in U.S. jurisdictions and territories, became an event for which JJ Investment would be paid up to $300,000.

The company took over work that had been started by Caribbean Regenerative Community Development Inc. (CRCD), a scientific nonprofit that the Department of Natural and Environmental Resources (DRNA in Spanish) had hired in July 2025 to coordinate the event. Its contract was not renewed in September, when Natural Resources Secretary Waldemar Quiles Pérez signed the agreement with JJ Investment to coordinate the event.

To secure its $67,504 contract, CRCD underwent an evaluation by a three-member committee from the DRNA, which gave the organization’s proposal the highest score among the two proposals submitted. JJ Investment did not submit a proposal.

JJ Investment’s subsequent $300,000 contract — more than 440% higher than CRCD’s — was awarded directly, without a competitive process. According to CPI sources, pressure from La Fortaleza led to the event being handed over to JJ Investment. For nearly a month, both companies were under contract simultaneously to perform similar tasks. The CPI requested a response from La Fortaleza to these allegations by email and text message, but as of publication, press director Marieli Padró had not responded.

Data from the Office of the Electoral Comptroller show that since 2013, Pabón Castrodad has donated $117,000 to the governing New Progressive Party and to the political campaigns of party leaders. Among the committees that received the most money were those of Gov. Jenniffer González Colón, Senate President Thomas Rivera Schatz, former governors Ricardo Rosselló Nevares and Pedro Pierluisi Urrutia, and former Rep. Ricardo Llerandi Cruz, who resigned from his seat and later became Chief of Staff.

JJ Investment also has contracts with agencies led by the power couple and two of the governor’s closest Cabinet officials: Francisco Domenech and Verónica Ferraiuoli Hornedo. In January 2026, the Puerto Rico Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority, whose executive director is Domenech, awarded the company a $450,000 contract for communications and event coordination services. On Oct. 6, 2025, JJ Investment Group signed a $35,000 contract for communications consulting with the Puerto Rico Convention Center District Authority, chaired by Ferraiuoli Hornedo. On July 1, she awarded the company another contract, for $188,000.

From 2017 to July 1, 2026, JJ Investment Group, incorporated in 2011, accumulated more than $36 million in contracts with 19 Puerto Rico government agencies.

The CPI sought a response from Pabón Castrodad regarding this investigation, but staff at his office said he was unavailable.

It is almost impossible to trace JJ Investment Group LLC’s work because it has no official website, no active social media profiles, no known portfolio of private clients — if any — and no record of press coverage about the work it performs.

The Pabón Castrodad family has become known in the business sector for event planning, concerts, and wellness and beauty care. Before contracting with the government through JJ Investment, it contracted with the government from 2010 to 2012 through Lincoln Road Productions, whose corporate registration was canceled in 2014. Through government contracting, JJ Investment has promoted itself as an advertising agency that designs campaigns and places ads in the media.

The Coral Event

Among the work CRCD performed, for which it billed $43,000, was exploring potential sites for U.S. Coral Reef Task Force participants to visit and lodging options. The CPI learned from several sources that the Ponce Hilton was the most favorable option because of its proximity to suggested site visits, such as the Guánica Bay watershed, and because it was less expensive for the federal agencies that would cover lodging costs for their participating officials.

However, some of the time, effort and federal funds invested in that work were lost because of the DRNA’s decision not to hold the meeting in Puerto Rico’s southwest region as planned, but instead at the Hilton Garden Inn in San Juan. The U.S. Coral Reef Task Force was in Puerto Rico from April 28 to May 5, 2026.

“After a management assessment of the event’s organization and scope, as well as the participation of representatives from several states, the Department of Natural and Environmental Resources identified a nonrecurring fund to carry out the holistic, non-segmented organization of the event,” the DRNA secretary said in a written explanation to the CPI.

JJ Investment’s contract included responsibilities similar to CRCD’s, the CPI found after reviewing the agreements, except that JJ Investment’s added audiovisual technical production. The natural resources secretary said the production included “simultaneous interpretation, sign-language interpretation and space décor.”

The Medicare and Medicaid Event

On May 19, 2026, the Department of Health hired JJ Investment Group for $144,957.50 to plan and carry out the Puerto Rico Health Policy Conference. The event was held that same day.

The event had been officially announced days earlier at a news conference as a strategy “to present a unified position” between Puerto Rico’s public and private sectors “to defend” Medicaid and Medicare funding.

Many of the contracted services, by their nature, required work before the event. For example, the company had to handle the event’s technical and logistical production, including comprehensive planning and coordination, registration and accreditation of participants, space design, signage, installation of LED screens, lighting systems, sound, audiovisual integration, setup and dismantling, as well as the collection and analysis of attendance data.

Health Secretary Víctor Ramos Otero told the CPI he did not receive instructions from La Fortaleza to favor JJ Investment in the contracting process.

“Those contracts were awarded through an RFP [request for proposals], and all the documentation is there,” the health secretary said. “Those RFPs are uploaded to the Health Department platform. People have to apply through that platform. Several companies apply, an analysis is done, they are scored and, depending on that result, the contract is awarded to the bidder that is best suited,” Ramos Otero said.

That scoring system is precisely what the outgoing economic development secretary alleges was corrupted at his agency so that the company that received the highest score, Digimedia, would not get the contract and JJ Investment would instead. In his complaint, Negrón Reichard said that Norberto Almodóvar pressured OGPe into selecting JJ Investment Group. Negrón Reichard said Almodóvar (OGPe’s head at the time), assured that JJ Investment was the company the governor wanted selected. La Fortaleza and Almodóvar have rejected those allegations.

According to the health secretary, signing the agreement on the same day as the event “happens with almost all those event contracts.” He added that “the date is extended until November because I cannot pay outside the contract and, because of the bureaucracy, we extend the date” so payments can be made while the contract is in effect.

Ramos Otero’s response and the sequence of events suggest that, to accelerate the process, the contractor began doing its work before signing the contract. Several laws regulating government contracting in Puerto Rico, as well as Puerto Rico Supreme Court precedent, require public contracts to be in writing, registered with the Office of the Comptroller and prospective — meaning contractors cannot bill for services provided before a signed contract exists.

JJ Investment had already been a Health Department contractor under contracts awarded by the previous secretary, Carlos Mellado. The company exceeded $5.6 million in contracts with the agency between 2023 and 2026.

When contacted by the CPI, Mellado did not recall the company JJ Investment. He stressed that under his administration, it was not normal to sign contracts on the same day as the activities for which services were being contracted, “because all those processes have to be submitted ahead of time, including procedures with the Office of Management and Budget.”

La Fortaleza Events

JJ Investment’s contracting under New Progressive Party administrations is not new. The Office of the Comptroller’s contract registry shows that since 2017, JJ Investment had contracts with Ricardo Rosselló Nevares’ administration. Several of the agreements were directly with the Office of the Governor to provide lighting, sound, setup and dismantling services for news conferences and events attended by the then-governor or first lady Beatriz Areizaga. The contracts began at up to $6,000 a month, increased to $8,000 and later to $10,000.

The company had provided services to Rosselló Nevares’ election campaign. In that political race, Raymond Cruz Hernández was the administrator of Rosselló Nevares’ political committee and, after the victory, became one of his special aides. During the administration’s most difficult moment, the summer of 2019, Cruz Hernández participated in the political committee’s hiring of producer Sixto Jorge Díaz Colón, known as Sixto George and now convicted on federal charges, through D.R. Consulting to manage the crisis through the media.

In several proposals submitted to government agencies during the current four-year term, JJ Investment identifies Raymond Cruz Hernández as its government relations consultant. In one contract with the Puerto Rico Gaming Commission, Cruz Hernández’s email appears as the contact. In August 2019, after Rosselló Nevares announced his resignation in July of that year, Cruz Hernández registered the company Assertus Consulting Group with the Department of State.

After Rosselló Nevares left office, JJ Investment’s contracts at La Fortaleza ended. During Wanda Vázquez’s administration, only its contracts with the Agroenterprise Development Administration (ADEA in Spanish) remained in effect. During the 2017-2020 term, the agency’s administrator, Robert M. Bradley Pérez, awarded JJ four contracts totaling $1.3 million for professional consulting on events and projects, the agency’s communications strategies in connection with the Department of Agriculture, and to “support” emerging agribusinesses in brand conceptualization, image direction and promotions.

The contracts with the ADEA related to the coordination of the event known as Expoalimentaria state that, because JJ Investment, given the fiscal crisis, had quoted a price below the actual cost of producing such an event, it was allowed to retain the revenue it secured from sponsors of the government event.

When Pedro Pierluisi Urrutia took office at La Fortaleza in 2021, JJ Investment’s contracts began flourishing again. The Pierluisi administration signed $24 million in contracts with the company. The Children’s Development and Care Administration, known as ACUDEN, alone gave it 16 contracts.

The agency, a component of the Department of the Family whose mission is to provide tools for child welfare, committed $8.4 million to events coordinated by JJ Investment and advertising work that, for the most part, was not related to direct services for children, particularly the poorest in Puerto Rico. For example, $84,000 was committed for décor for a futuristic experience, and another $90,000 for backpacks and caps bearing the agency’s logo. At the time, the Administration for Children and Families of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found several deficiencies in ACUDEN’s management, including the identification of cases of institutional abuse at Head Start centers.

The contracts were endorsed by then-ACUDEN Administrator Roberto Pagán Santiago. On at least three occasions, Pagán Santiago asked the Office of Management and Budget to allow the direct hiring of JJ Investment without going through the competitive process required by Executive Order 2021-029 for service contracts of more than $250,000. The Office of Management and Budget approved it each time.

The Safe Bet

The Puerto Rico Gaming Commission signed $7.8 million in contracts with JJ Investment between 2021 and 2024, and those agreements have been renewed under the current administration, pushing the total to $10.7 million.

When the first contract was awarded, the commission was headed by Orlando Rivera Carrión, who told the CPI he did not know JJ Investment existed before receiving a service proposal from the company.

“They came to the Gaming Commission. They brought me a proposal,” Rivera Carrión said. He said he did not remember whether the company was referred to him by La Fortaleza or whether it was a direct approach by a company representative. “The Puerto Rico casinos brought to my desk the concern that there was money in the account for promoting the ‘Jackpot del Encanto’ that was not being used,” he said.

Jackpot del Encanto is the marketing name used for those slot machines in Puerto Rico’s casinos, under an agreement that began in 2015 between the Puerto Rico Tourism Company and Aristocrat, registered as AI (Puerto Rico) PTY LTD, a subsidiary of the Australian company Aristocrat Leisure Limited.

Aristocrat designed slot machines for this market, adapted with visuals of Puerto Rico’s attractions. The contract states that Aristocrat would provide maintenance and supervision services for the machines. The Puerto Rico government, the casinos and Aristocrat receive a percentage of each wager placed, officials announced at the time.

According to Rivera Carrión, hiring JJ Investment to promote bets on these machines was not solely the agency’s decision. “There were three votes. The Gaming Commission, the [representatives of the] casinos and [those of] Aristocrat, which oversees those machines, were involved,” he emphasized.

The approach allegedly came from Javier Gómez Torres, a music industry executive known in the entertainment world as “Cholo.” He told the CPI that, at one point, he did business with JJ Investment during that period, though he made clear that he broke ties with the company about two years ago.

“JJ Investment was the one that presented the proposal to the Gaming Commission,” said Gómez Torres, who clarified that he has not worked with JJ Investment during this government term. He also said the contracting processes proceeded “exactly as they do with anyone who does work for the government. People file an RFP [request for proposals], submit it, and if you get it, you get it. Just like De la Cruz, Sajo, Arco, or any advertising company does. It’s the same,” Gómez Torres said.

But as Juan Carlos Santaella Marchán, the current gaming commissioner, explained, contracts like this one, which are funded with money generated from wagers, do not require a competitive process. The money used to pay for Jackpot del Encanto advertising and marketing comes from bets placed on Aristocrat-owned machines in casinos.

Santaella Marchán said in written statements that the funds allocated “for the execution of advertising campaigns for Jackpot del Encanto are private in origin and therefore do not come from the Government of Puerto Rico.”

However, the agreement between the parties was made through a government contract registered with the Office of the Comptroller, which states that payments to JJ Investment “will be made from the own-funds budget line” corresponding to the commission’s Professional, Technical and Consulting Services.

Comptroller Carmen Vega Fournier said money used to pay for a service contracted by an agency head, held in an agency’s own-funds budget line and maintained in an agency account, is indeed considered public funds. She added that it is up to the Puerto Rico Office of the Comptroller to audit this type of contract, “because once an agency administers funds from a contract, it has to use them for a public purpose.”

Inspector General Ivelisse Torres Rivera was not available to respond to a similar inquiry from the CPI.

The CPI tried to obtain reactions from the two casino executives who are members of the Jackpot del Encanto board, Ismael Vega, general manager of Casino Metro, and Sigfrido De Jesús, of Casino del Mar, but neither was available.

Gómez Torres said, “I wasn’t the one who submitted the proposal; it was the company [JJ Investment], because the contract wasn’t awarded to me, it was awarded to the company. But I have nothing to do with JJ Investment, and I want nothing to do with JJ Investment. To me, the owner of JJ Investment is a real crook — dirty and underhanded.” Gómez added that he is still owed money for his services to this day.

As of June 30, 2026, Gómez Torres’ company, DJF Consulting Group LLC, has two active contracts with the Gaming Commission totaling $394,323 for the design, setup and dismantling of displays and promotional items at events sponsored by the commission.

Santaella Marchán told the CPI that the continuation of JJ Investment’s services at the agency has mainly been in response to recommendations from representatives of the casinos and Aristocrat, “because of the product’s success,” he said, referring to Jackpot del Encanto.

The Gaming Commission did not specify the legal framework for creating this committee. Santaella Marchán said the committee has existed since the Puerto Rico Tourism Company was responsible for gambling.

However, Jaime Irizarry, former director of gambling at the Puerto Rico Tourism Company from 2018 to 2020, told the CPI that under his leadership, casino managers and Aristocrat approved the advertising media plan, but the selection and hiring of the advertising company was the Tourism Company’s prerogative.

The Youth Event

On Dec. 5, 2025, Department of the Family Secretary Suzanne Roig Fuertes hired JJ Investment to develop an educational campaign that, among other things, included media advertising for the Continuum of Care program, known as CoC, which provides transitional housing and permanent housing with support services for people experiencing homelessness. The campaign seeks to educate the public about homelessness and includes people experiencing homelessness themselves, their families and organizations that assist them. The $107,245 contract lasted three months.

In April 2026, Roig Fuertes again hired JJ Investment, this time for $17,000 to run the campaign over seven months. Although the contract amount was substantially lower and the term longer, the services were essentially the same as those in the previous contract.

On June 15, the Department of the Family also assigned JJ Investment to handle the Summer Youth Congress under the slogan “Life Skills, Leadership and Transition to Adulthood.” The contract has a maximum value of $213,850.

The Automobile Accident Compensation Administration, the Health Insurance Administration, ACUDEN, the Traffic Safety Commission and the Puerto Rico Innovation and Technology Service, or PRITS, have also awarded contracts during this four-year term to JJ Investment. In the first year and a half of the González Colón administration, the company has secured $12.5 million in contracts, including a $10,750 sponsorship from the Tourism Company and a $2,415 sponsorship from the Department of Economic Development and Commerce.

Both sponsorships were for participation in “Puerto Rico Compra Expo Suplidores” at the Convention Center, an event that the General Services Administration assigned to JJ Investment after a request for proposals. JJ Investment v does not charge the General Services Administration for its services but instead covers its expenses by selling exhibition space to bidders.

At this event, bidders offer their products to buyers from government agencies in Puerto Rico. Its fifth edition was held last month.

This translation was generated with the assistance of AI and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and clarity.