In the fall of 2013, one of Mexico’s top housing officials posted an item on Twitter about an advertising campaign promoting mortgages for low-income Mexicans. The campaign’s message was simple: “The most important thing in life is in your house.”
It carried the tag line, “Homes with value.”
The official, Alejandro Murat Hinojosa, knows something about homes with value, especially across the border.
Over the years, he and members of his immediate family — starting with his father, José Murat Casab, a former governor of Oaxaca — have bought at least six properties in the United States, including two condominiums near a ski resort in Utah, another at the beach in South Texas and at least one in Manhattan, according to records and interviews. In New York, José Murat’s children have also lived for periods of time in one of the more modest condos at the luxurious Time Warner Center overlooking Central Park.
Ownership of the homes was often obscured through variations on family names listed on deeds or through shell companies, according to records examined by The New York Times. In fact, on the day the younger Mr. Murat tweeted about the housing program, public filings in Florida recorded the transfer of a $750,000 Boca Raton condo that had been purchased in his wife’s name to an entity called IMRO 2013 Trust.
The Murats’ real estate holdings stand in contrast to the Everyman image that José Murat, renowned for his political might and booming personality, worked to project as governor.
“I arrived to the state government with my wife, Lupita, and my four children,” he said a year before his term ended in 2004. “And I’m leaving as I arrived, with the same trousers, with the same shoes, with the same shirts and the same car.”
The Murat properties, which emerged during a Times investigation into the people behind shell companies that own condominiums at the Time Warner Center, have not been the subject of any official inquiry and there is no evidence of any wrongdoing behind the purchases. But the private assets of Mexico’s public officials have come under intense focus recently with a fresh round of revelations and protests centered on the country’s endemic corruption. (Read a summary of this article in Spanish.)
Last fall, a scandal erupted over reports that a government contractor had built a multimillion-dollar home for the wife of Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto. While Mr. Peña Nieto’s wife, Angélica Rivera, said she was paying for it with money she earned as a soap opera star, she also revealed she owned a condo in Florida. Around the same time, Mr. Peña Nieto disclosed his own $3.3 million in real estate, jewelry, art and other investments. Last week, he said a new federal comptroller would examine purchases by him and his wife of homes in Mexico.
And in December, an official at Infonavit, the housing agency run by Alejandro Murat, resigned after a photo of his son with a Porsche was posted on social media, setting off a furor and prompting federal inquiries. The official said the posting was a joke and the car did not belong to his family.
These revelations added to the already widespread anger over accusations that corrupt police officers were involved in the abduction and presumed murder last year of 43 college students by a drug cartel. As demonstrations spread, Mr. Peña Nieto was reeling. His Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI, had ruled the country for seven decades until 2000, and he had pledged to erase its legacy of corruption when he took office more than two years ago.
José Murat, the former Oaxaca governor, has long been a PRI insider. His rise from a childhood in one of Mexico’s poorest states to a position as a power broker who has the president’s ear is the stuff of lore. There was a failed, and to some skeptics faked, attempt on his life; a long campaign to block a federal audit of state spending; and a record of hardball political tactics. Mr. Murat, who has also served as a federal legislator, recently raised his profile again by leading an effort by the Peña Nieto administration to build a cross-party legislative agenda.
Mr. Murat’s 39-year-old son, Alejandro, by contrast understated and polished, worked for Mr. Peña Nieto in state government before being appointed to the federal housing post. In some ways, the father and son represent the new and the old of the PRI, said Edward L. Gibson, a Northwestern University professor who studied Oaxaca for a book on authoritarian governments.
“Peña Nieto may be the new face of the PRI,” Mr. Gibson said, “but the dinosaurs are still part of the coalition.”
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“Alejandro has his own merits and his father’s figure may even be uncomfortable at times,” said Dulce María Sauri, a former national leader of the PRI.
Alejandro Murat practiced law for a few years before working for the State of Mexico, where Mr. Peña Nieto was governor, and then becoming head of Infonavit, which administers loans and mortgages to a large number of Mexican workers.
All the while, the family has taken steps that obscure the ownership of several holdings in the United States.
Alejandro Murat’s wife, Ivette Morán, had purchased the $1.18 million condo on West 55th Street using her maternal surname. The deed reads “Ivette M. Rodríguez,” but in one place it lists “Morán” under her signature.
In 2011, while her husband was working for the State of Mexico, Ms. Morán transferred the property at no cost to a trust called Himo Ltd. That transfer was handled by Mr. Zampino, the lawyer who also set up the shell company that owns the Time Warner condo used by the Murats. (Mr. Zampino told The Times that he never worked for the family.)
In a statement provided through the housing agency, Alejandro Murat said the 55th Street condo is owned by his uncle, José Hinojosa. Mr. Hinojosa’s name is on the forwarding address for a temporary mortgage placed on the condo, but Ivette Morán Rodríguez is listed as the borrower. She is also listed on the deed as the president of the Himo trust, and she signed the line for the buyer.
Alejandro Murat’s statement also said the Florida condo is owned by his mother-in-law. But when the condo was transferred into a trust in late 2013, his wife was listed as the trustee. There have been two mortgages on the condo, one signed by Alejandro Murat and his wife, and the other signed by his wife.
Late last year, the day after The Times contacted the Murats with an additional interview request, José Murat’s four children transferred their Utah condos into shell companies. Both companies — XILA Company and LOMA AEAI — were incorporated in Florida in 2013 by Alejandro Murat’s wife. The forwarding address for one company was the Florida condominium.
José Murat’s youngest daughter, Lorena, has been the most recent Murat at the Time Warner Center, living there for two years and studying fashion at Parsons the New School for Design. She now runs a fashion blog called The Fancy Archive. The site’s registration lists the Time Warner condo as its base.
Louise Story reported from New York, and Alejandra Xanic von Bertrab from Oaxaca, Mexico.
To contact the reporters, email louise@nytimes.com or alejandraxanic@gmail.com.
Design, graphics and production by Tom Giratikanon, Mika Gröndahl, Josh Keller, Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Graham Roberts, Shreeya Sinha, Rumsey Taylor and Jeremy White.
A version of this article appears in print on February 11, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
