A longtime California real estate investor has been implicated in lawsuits involving hundreds of millions of dollars in loan debt.
Andrew Stupin has been sued by Banc of California, Enterprise Bank & Trust and Nano Banc as they look to collect on loans worth a combined $108 million, Reuters reported. Real estate investment firm PMF CA REIT has also sued Stupin and others looking to collect nearly $7 million.
Stupin, who has been working in real estate for about half a century and owns an elite 7-on-7 high school football program, is also implicated in lawsuits from Zions Bancorporation and Western Alliance Bancorporation.
Zions subsidiary California Bank & Trust claims it lent more than $60 million to an investor group including Stupin that listed 16 properties as collateral. It later discovered other lenders actually held liens on several of those same buildings, so Zions was left out in the cold when the properties went into liquidation.
Western Alliance similarly filed a complaint in August claiming the same investor group, led by Stupin and prolific landlord and Republican donor Gerald Marcil, owes it nearly $99 million after the investors allegedly failed to disclose that some of the collateral properties were already in foreclosure.
Stupin is accused across five lawsuits of guaranteeing roughly $115 million in loans tied to properties near Los Angeles and San Francisco; those loans are now in default. Combined with the Western Alliance and Zions loans, Stupin’s ties to alleged bad loans total more than $270 million.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told analysts last week that scenarios where regional banks are tied to borrowers accused of fraud, give him pause.
“My antenna goes up when things like that happen,” Dimon said, per CNN. “And I probably shouldn’t say this, but when you see one cockroach, there are probably more… Everyone should be forewarned on this.”
Marcil and Stupin assert their innocence in the cases.
“My clients vehemently deny all the allegations of wrongdoing,” Brandon Tran, an attorney representing Marcil and Stupin, told Bloomberg. “These claims are unfounded and misrepresent the facts. We are confident that once all the evidence is presented, our clients will be fully vindicated.”
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