Between January and April 2021, Rodrigo Gutiérrez Mueller, older brother of Beatriz Gutiérrez Mueller, wife of former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, registered together with other partners a couple of companies dedicated to financial services and money transfers called Sendos del Bienestar SA de CV, and Pagos del Bienestar SA de CV.
Among the partners of the corporate names, one registered in Mexico City and another in Jalisco, two people of foreign origin are named, according to documents from the Public Registry of Commerce consulted: Carlos Alberto Grijalva and Brian Ronald Cleland.
The names of the foreign shareholders coincide with those of those accused of money laundering in the United States: Carlos A. Grijalva and Brian R. Cleland. They are awaiting a sentence, after accepting their responsibility in the laundering of more than 46 million dollars.
The accusation, apparently, is not linked to the Mexican companies.
According to documentation from the United States Department of Justice, Grijalva and Cleland simulated the “sale of masks and other personal protective equipment against COVID-19.”
It was in August 2023 when the US government accused three Californian citizens: Bruce Jin, Carlos A. Grijalva, both 60 years old, and Brian R. Cleland, 72 years old, of being responsible for a million-dollar money laundering operation of resources that had been fraudulently extracted from “state unemployment compensation funds and other public funds.”
A bulletin from the Department of Justice explains that, during 2021 and early 2022, the three people, along with other unidentified accomplices who are presumed to live in China, opened bank accounts with stolen identities and, from there, began to claim financial aid in different states of the American Union such as Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida. The years coincide with the openings of Mexican companies.
“According to Acting U.S. Attorney John C. Gurganus, the indictment alleges that Cleland, Jin and Grijalva, along with other unnamed co-conspirators, conspired to obtain state unemployment compensation funds and other public funds through fraud,” the bulletin reads.
They triangulated the money to China through companies opened in Colorado, United States, in the names of Grijalva and Cleland. In exchange, they kept about 10% of the resources they managed to launder. Between January and November 2025, the three defendants acknowledged their participation in the operations, and are currently awaiting a sentencing scheduled for May of this year.
At the top you can see the articles of incorporation of the company Pagos del Bienestar, where Rodrigo Gutiérrez Mueller, Carlos Alberto Grijalva and Brian Ronald Cleland appear together as shareholders; In the second document you can see the accusation in the United States where two people named Carlos A. Grijalva and Brian R. Cleland appear together.
Additionally, in September 2021, Cleland and Grijalva established a mirror company in California called Pagos del Bienestar INC, dedicated to sending money and remittances.
A document from the California Business Registry states that they declared the same addresses that Cleland and Grijalva used for companies linked to the Department of Justice’s money laundering investigation; a first address in Park Granada, in the city of Calabasas, and another on Keswick Street, city of Simi Valley, located in the San Fernando Valley.
The company Pagos del Bienestar INC. was created with the same name as the Mexican company Pagos del Bienestar SA de CV, where Rodrigo Gutiérrez Mueller is a partner.
The company Diseños del Bienestar was created on January 29, 2021 in Mexico City. In its social objective, it declared to provide professional intermediation and business collaboration services for the commercialization of financial products and services recognized by the Mexican financial system through the execution of contracts, agreements and collaboration agreements with various financial institutions.
The incorporation partners were Rodrigo Gutiérrez Mueller, brother-in-law of López Obrador and brother of Beatriz; Alejandro Medina Custodio, head of the Patrimonial and Economic Intelligence Unit of the state of Tabasco and attorney for lawsuits and collections of the company; Héctor de la Paz Cázares, former director of the Specialized Unit for Investigation of Fiscal and Financial Crimes of the defunct Attorney General’s Office of the Republic, who in 2016 was in charge of investigating the alleged relationship between former governor Javier Duarte and a network of shell companies, and Efrén Calderón González, who between 2004 and 2005 was Secretary General of the City Council of Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, and In 2009 he tried to be a candidate for municipal president for the Green Party without success.
There are also Carlos Alberto Grijalva, the same name mentioned in the United States indictment, an accountant named Antonio Ayala Ayub and a person named Iván Israel Hernández Serrano.
The Pagos del Bienestar company was created on April 30, 2021, in Guadalajara, Jalisco. Among its activities are purchasing or collecting demand documents denominated and payable in foreign currency by financial entities with no limit per document; the sale of documents in foreign currency that exchange houses issue by credit institutions in the country, branches and agencies abroad, or banks abroad; the purchase and sale of currencies through transfers of funds over bank accounts; create or belong to any type of Popular Financial Companies or Fintech national or international, obtain financial resources from both national and foreign credit institutions, or from national or foreign companies or associations. Also enter into agreements, contracts and agreements with municipal, state or federal agencies and offices.
In this company, Rodrigo Gutiérrez Mueller, Efrén Calderón González, Alejandro Medina Custodio, Antonio Ayala Ayub, Héctor de la Paz Cázares and Carlos Alberto Grijalva repeat as shareholders.
In the corporate name, the names that coincide with the two defendants are seen together as shareholders: Brian Ronald Cleland and Carlos Alberto Grijalva.
One more shareholder is Valerie Soideth Ochoa Montañez. No public records were found for her.
Image of the birth certificate of Rodrigo Gutiérrez Mueller, Beatriz’s brother.
In 2004, Rodrigo Gutiérrez Mueller returned to Mexico and decided to live in Guadalajara. He lived for years in the United States. He told it in March 2020 in an interview with a media outlet in Guadalajara.
In that talk he also assured that, for years, he had dedicated himself to hospitality and gastronomy, and that at that time he was participating in the National Chamber of Tequila.
What was not said then was that in that month of March he registered the first of six companies in which he appears as a shareholder: Quartz Team International México, dedicated to the purchase and sale of construction and decoration materials.
He created Quartz with five other partners: Antonio Morales Díaz, current mayor of Tapalpa, Jalisco, the municipality where Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, alias Mencho, was hiding. It is the second time that he has taken the mayor’s office, previously he was municipal president in the period 2015-2018. In addition, José Rubén Esqueda Rodríguez, Juan Jorge Huerta Ortiz, and a couple of foreigners named José Rico and Tom Tung Cao appear as shareholders. Until the last record, Morales Díaz remains president of the company.
Rodrigo Gutiérrez Mueller founded a second company with Antonio Morales Díaz, called Quartz Stone, dedicated to the commercialization of quartz. Both were registered in León, Guanajuato, and in the latter, Morales Díaz is located as a surveillance advisor.
Interviewed by telephone, Morales Díaz stated that the Quartz companies were a business extracting and selling quartz for domestic use that never took off because one of the lands from which the material was going to be extracted in Guanajuato was not suitable. He said that they had another site in Baja California that was more suitable, but that the capitalist partner backed out and they remained as “paper” companies. The mayor assured that the firms have accounting problems for not having deregistered them.
In the call, Morales Díaz insisted that this was an activity that he carried out personally, and that it was not linked to political or government work.
On the other hand, in December 2018, in the first days of the López Obrador government, Rodrigo Gutiérrez Mueller helped negotiate with the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit a line of credit from Banobras for 25 million pesos for the municipal president of Tamazula de Gordiano, Jalisco, Javier Álvarez Chávez. In a video released by Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity, the Jalisco politician can be seen thanking him for his help.
“To my friend Rodrigo Gutiérrez Mueller, brother of our first lady of the country, wife of the President of the Republic, thank you for your presence: I greatly appreciate that you accompanied me to the federal Treasury to achieve those 25 million and the refinancing of the global line for the municipality of Tamazula.”
Álvarez Chávez alleged that Gutiérrez Mueller had accompanied him, but had not interceded for him with the Treasury because he did not enter the government offices.
