Treasurer had close ties to ‘problem landlord’ in St. Louis

ST. LOUIS — Tina Pennington had only lived in the home on Ohio Avenue a few weeks when the pipes froze and burst. The floor heaters and radiators didn’t work.

Pennington called her landlord’s maintenance team and they sent someone who told her the water they added to the kitchen radiator leaked right through.

“I’ve been hearing they’ll fix my heat since,” she said earlier this month.

That was in 2021. The heat still doesn’t work. She uses electric heaters, which cause the electrical sockets to catch fire. The roof is leaking in the back bedroom. The garage is unsecured and still full of the last tenant’s stuff.

Fed up, she called the city to inspect the place. An inspector told her the house should be condemned, but that the city would wait until she found a new place to stay before issuing a condemnation.

Pennington, a dispatcher for St. Louis Animal Care and Control, lives in the Dutchtown rental with her 1-year-old daughter, a fact she’d remind maintenance as she tried to cajole them into fixing the house’s constant problems over the last three years. She said she even spoke on the phone with the former landlord, Vivek Malek.

Malek is now the Missouri treasurer, a statewide position to which Gov. Mike Parson, a fellow Republican, appointed him in December 2022. V&V Properties, a company Malek and his wife incorporated, owned at least 10 properties, where city building inspection records cited dozens of violations over the years.

Beyond his own holdings, business and real estate records show that Malek worked with south city landlord Nathan Cooper, who attracted scrutiny from city officials several years ago for poor conditions at many of the estimated 200 properties owned by companies connected to him. Malek was listed as the registered agent for many of Cooper’s companies until shortly before his appointment.

Pennington, who said her Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher pays about $1,600 a month in rent for the house, said she didn’t know her former landlord was a top state official until a reporter contacted her.

“I don’t think he should be in that high of a position if he can’t even take care of his tenants,” she said.

Malek said his family’s real estate holdings were mostly managed by his late mother, who died in July 2022. He, his wife and his brother had a stake in the properties, but Malek said “it was more of a family enterprise” and his involvement hardly stretched beyond the legal paperwork. A management company handled maintenance requests, and his family would pay the company’s bills as they came due. He never spoke to tenants, he said, and denied that he ever talked to Pennington.

“I don’t even know where most of the properties are,” he said in an interview Friday. “It was such a passive investment I had.”

These days, Malek is no longer involved in renting to low-income tenants on the city’s south side, some of whom pay with federal housing vouchers. V&V Properties sold the Ohio Avenue rental, along with 10 other properties, at the end of 2022. The management company is still in place, though, according to two tenants interviewed by the newspaper. Malek served as the management company’s registered agent until just before he took office in January 2023.

The governor’s surprise choice of Malek vaulted the Wildwood attorney to a high-ranking position in state politics overnight, and media coverage largely focused on his inspiring immigration story.

Parson’s office touted the fact that Malek would be the first person of color to occupy a statewide office. Malek, they said, emigrated from India to attend Southeast Missouri State University with just $300 in his pocket, later becoming an attorney and starting an immigration law practice. Aside from Parson appointing him to SEMO’s Board of Regents in 2020, Malek had little public profile.

And when Parson named Malek treasurer in December 2022, filling the open position vacated after Scott Fitzpatrick was elected state auditor, his past involvement in the south St. Louis real estate operation was not widely known.

Malek for years had worked with Cooper, a former Cape Girardeau state lawmaker who at one time was part of companies that owned around 200 properties in the neighborhoods around Dutchtown and Gravois Park. Cooper was the subject of two lengthy Riverfront Times exposés in 2017 and 2018 that chronicled tenant complaints about the properties’ conditions and city officials’ concern that Cooper couldn’t maintain his rentals. One of Cooper’s companies, Gateway Residences, still faces thousands of dollars in fines from city code violations on dozens of properties.

“He was the biggest problem landlord that I dealt with in the eight years I represented those neighborhoods,” St. Louis Alderwoman Cara Spencer said of Cooper. “And that’s not an exaggeration.”

Malek had known Cooper before the real estate work. He worked at Cooper’s law firm in 2007, according to the Southeast Missourian newspaper. Both were immigration attorneys.

Years later, Malek helped with Cooper’s St. Louis real estate business. Malek was listed as the registered agent in state paperwork for many of the limited liability companies Cooper held his properties in. The future treasurer occasionally handled eviction proceedings, contested sewer liens and represented one company in a lawsuit. The phone number tenants say they are told to call for maintenance is for a company called Innovative Concepts Unlimited, incorporated by Cooper in 2001. In 2016, Malek became its registered agent.

Malek told the Post-Dispatch he only spent 1% of his time on the real estate operation and incorporated Cooper’s companies as a favor to his old friend. Other legal work he did for the companies was rare, he said. He only learned of the complaints against Cooper’s operation in recent days after reading the Riverfront Times stories for himself.

“I had no involvement whatsoever except for being a registered agent for his companies, which I did for a lot of my clients, a lot of my friends, without any monetary fees or gains, just a favor,” Malek said. “I had no business interest.”

Given the size of Cooper’s operation, Malek said his involvement in a few legal proceedings shows he was hardly involved. “Every now and then,” Malek said, “I’d help him out.”

For several years, Malek’s family company, V&V Properties, owned at least 10 of its own properties, most of them acquired from companies tied to Cooper. One of them is where Pennington lives. Another is on Eiler Street in the Carondelet neighborhood, where Shanethia Howard and Justin Hollins care for 10 children.

Howard was painting her living room on a recent Monday afternoon, tired of waiting for the management company. She ticked off complaints about the house where she has lived for two years: The front door glass was broken and fixed with a thin board. Cold air leaks in through cracks in the floor and walls. A shelf wasn’t secured to the wall and fell. The ceiling leaks if someone takes a bath on the second floor. There’s mold and rats in the basement.

Maintenance shows up when they know a St. Louis Housing Authority inspector is coming. Howard, too, has her rent paid via Section 8 vouchers. They patch the place up so it will pass, but the fixes don’t last.

“They don’t fix it until they have to,” Howard said.

Asked if more could have been invested in the properties, Malek said his family always responded when the maintenance company said repairs were needed.

“If anything were brought to my attention or my mom’s attention, I think we would have taken care of it,” Malek said.

City building inspection records list dozens of violations over the last 10 years for addresses tied to the Malek company. Most are minor and the city marked the problems as fixed. But some were considered major. One other rental, on Keokuk Street, didn’t have heat in December 2022 while V&V Properties still owned it. In 2015, a property one of Malek’s companies owned on Nebraska Avenue was raided after detectives suspected a tenant there was selling drugs and guns. Police seized heroin, crack, pills and five guns, according to a police report.

There are two sides to every story, Malek said, and there were probably plenty of tenants who had no issues with Cooper or his management company. Indeed, one of Malek’s former tenants, Sharell Prather, said he had lived in his Tennessee Avenue home for about 10 years. He didn’t know the Malek family had owned it, but he remembers talking to Cooper years ago. Management usually gets to fixing things within a week. Maybe it’s because his family always pays the rent on time, he chuckled.

“We’re pretty good tenants,” Prather said. “Every time we need something fixed, we get it fixed.”

The state treasurer’s ties to Cooper aren’t readily apparent in state business records because he used to spell his name differently.

His office said earlier this month that he changed the spelling of his surname from Malik to Malek when he became a U.S. citizen in 2017 because the new spelling is closer to how his name is pronounced in India and that people often thought Malik was his first name.

But records show continued use of the “Malik” spelling after 2017. In a court proceeding after 2017, he used the “Malik” spelling. His name is listed as Vivek Malik in a loan document from 2022.

When Parson appointed him to the SEMO board in 2020, the press release from the governor’s office spelled his last name “Malik.” Coverage in the Cape Girardeau newspaper, the Southeast Missourian, spelled his name Malik in several news stories after his appointment to the university board.

As soon as he was appointed state treasurer, the Cape Girardeau newspaper began spelling his name “Malek.”

Malek said he’s more assertive with his name spelling now that he has a brand as a statewide politician. It took time to update the spelling on documents such as his law license. The old spelling is still used on his bank account and one of his credit cards, for example. His driver’s license is Malek, and other documents between 2017 and 2023 do use the new spelling.

“It just took time to get things moved over,” he said.

As far as the governor’s press release appointing him to SEMO’s board, he said he doesn’t remember if he brought up the spelling.

“I was just elated and happy I got that appointment,” he said. “I think that was not something that I was really worried about.”

Malek’s association with Cooper, aside from the landlord’s reputation in South St. Louis, carried potential political baggage.

Elected to the Missouri House of Representatives in 2004, Cooper’s political career came to a sudden end when federal prosecutors indicted him in August 2007 on immigration fraud charges related to his efforts helping hundreds of foreign truck drivers enter the U.S. illegally. Malek was an attorney at Cooper’s firm as of March of that year. Only Cooper was charged in the scheme.

Malek said he is still grateful Cooper gave him his “first break” when he hired him. The two are still friends and talk a couple times a year, he said.

“He made a mistake, he paid for it, I’m not one to throw friends under the bus,” Malek said.

It’s unclear how many properties Cooper still owns in St. Louis. Companies tied to him appear to have sold a large portion of their holdings in recent years. Cooper could not be reached for comment.

Either way, Malek got out of the real estate operation shortly before he was sworn in as treasurer. He resigned as the registered agent of the LLCs that handled much of the business. Pamela Polka, who lists the same Creve Coeur address as Malek’s immigration law firm, is now the agent for roughly a dozen LLCs that had been under Malek’s name. Three, including one of Cooper’s main property holding companies, Teamo LLC, were dissolved in the last week, after the newspaper began trying to contact Cooper.

V&V Properties, the company incorporated by Malek, transferred its properties at the end of 2022 to Vandelay LLC, another company that Cooper had sold some properties to. Malek said after his mother passed, he and his brother had no interest in continuing to run the real estate company. It just took a few months to sell the properties, Malek said, and a sale happened to come together shortly before his appointment.

As for getting that appointment from Parson, Malek said he had been involved in politics for years and knew the governor back when he was in the Legislature. He is also friends with lobbyist and political consultant James Harris, an old law school friend of Cooper’s.

Harris co-chaired a nonprofit that paid for Parson’s inaugural celebrations in 2020. He had been close with Parson since he became governor in 2018. A Tony Messenger column in the Post-Dispatch that year described Harris speaking with Cooper shortly after Parson was sworn in.

Malek was the registered agent for a Harris company, Aestus Advisors, incorporated in 2014. It was dissolved in December 2022, just before Malek took office.

In an interview, Harris said the company was for some foreign consulting work he was considering, and Malek was not part of the business, he just incorporated it as a favor to Harris.

Harris and Malek have known each other for about 15 years, Harris said, and Malek had expressed some interest in “serving.” Harris said he introduced Malek “to a state representative or two” and recommended he meet with some GOP party officials.

“Vivek’s a good buddy, I wanted him to be successful,” said Harris, whose company is now working for Malek’s campaign.

Harris did not make the introduction to Parson, Malek said. He applied for the job along with eight other candidates because he felt called to serve and wanted to give back after doing well here.

Malek said he stopped being the registered agent for the real estate companies, put his law license on hold and took a pay cut because he wants to devote his full attention to being state treasurer.

He has already gotten results, he said. He has returned $51 million in unclaimed property, a larger annual amount than any other treasurer has returned. A state low-interest business lending program, MOBUCKS, stopped taking applications after being open for one day in January because of high demand that Malek said he helped gin up. He’s pushing bipartisan legislation that has already cleared the House and is advancing in the Senate to expand the program’s lending capacity to $1.2 billion from $800 million because of the demand.

His tenure hasn’t been without controversy. Last month, state lawmakers demanded he answer questions over his decision to put advertisements on unregulated slot machines owned by politically connected Torch Electronics that have been placed in gas stations throughout the state. Under fire, Malek pulled out of the arrangement.

Malek said he just wanted to find a new way to advertise his office’s unclaimed property program. It’s up to the Legislature to act and regulate the machines, he said.

“It was not a politically correct decision, it was a legally correct decision,” Malek said. “I am new to politics and I am learning, but I will not apologize for returning unclaimed money to people.”

On Tuesday, Malek filed to run for a full term as state treasurer. He’s one of six Republicans seeking the post.

“I have tried to bring the sleepy office of treasurer and make it more active and visible,” Malek said. “We have great programs that can help people.”

Josh Renaud and Kurt Erickson of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.