Rishi Kapoor’s fraud victims will likely get very little of their money back
Rishi Kapoor admitted that he stole tens of millions of dollars from real estate investors when he pleaded guilty last month in Miami federal court, but he also pledged to pay them back every penny, saying he would make it his “life’s work.”
The once-rising developer’s solemn promise is not likely to be fulfilled if court records in his federal criminal case and a parallel Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit are any indication.
Prosecutors say Kapoor, who is the former CEO of Location Ventures and URBIN companies and had ties to mayors in Miami and Coral Gables, owes at least $70 million in restitution to over 50 investors in his South Florida residential projects. But the investors will be lucky to recover a small fraction of that amount because of outstanding debts to secured creditors, misappropriated funds and other costs decreasing the net proceeds, according to lawyers and others familiar with Kapoor’s cases.
Long before Kapoor, 42, was indicted in March on fraud and related money-laundering and tax charges by prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, SEC enforcement lawyers sued him and his companies in late 2023, accusing him of fleecing investors before his Coral Gables-based real estate business collapsed that year.
Since the SEC filing, the court-appointed receiver, lawyer Bernice Lee, has sold more than $70 million in property and other assets belonging to Kapoor’s companies with approval from a federal judge, according to nine reports filed through March 2026.
But of that total, most of the proceeds have been allocated by the receiver to pay off outstanding loans and secured creditors such as Fort Lauderdale lender Martin Halpern, who was close to Kapoor — with no money being set aside for the dozens of unsecured investors so far. Court-approved settlements show Halpern is expected to be paid about $30 million for his multiple loans in two of Kapoor’s real estate deals — mostly from the receiver’s recent credit-based sale of URBIN’s condo and mixed-use project in Coconut Grove to Halpern himself.
Coral Gables lawyer Brian Barakat filed court papers in the SEC case on behalf of four people who invested $2 million in the Grove project, challenging the receiver’s planned allocation to Halpern and his family trusts. He described Halpern as an “insider” who has been a “primary beneficiary” of Lee’s work in the SEC case.
“It is shocking to pay off their loans first, while my investors got nothing and are expected to get nothing,” Barakat said, calling the receiver’s settlement with Halpern the “death knell” because only $800,000 will be carved out of the Grove sale for all the investors in the SEC case.
Halpern’s lawyer, Mark Raymond, called Barakat’s attacks “baseless.”
“The claim that Mr. Halpern was an insider was fake and defamatory,” Raymond said. “The court approved all these transactions and overruled all the objections because they were baseless. ... In addition, Mr. Halpern lost millions of dollars as a result of his investments being under-secured due to the fraud of Rishi Kapoor.”
Lee, through a spokeswoman, declined to comment for this article, but the receiver has noted in court papers that the planned payments to Halpern are legally required because he was a secured creditor, unlike the investors.
In addition to the planned payments to Halpern, about $2.3 million of the Location Ventures-URBIN asset sales have gone toward legal fees generated by Lee and other attorneys in her law firm, Kozyak Tropin & Throckmorton, forensic accountants, real estate brokers and property taxes. Those distributions were approved by U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Becerra, who is overseeing the SEC case.
Lee reported she currently has $7.8 million in funds, which include $3 million in cash and $3 million from the sale of a condo unit in Location Ventures’ completed project, Villa Valencia, in Coral Gables. She also has $1.75 million from a bond that secured 10% of each condo deposit by about 70 buyers in URBIN’s condo and mixed-use project in Miami Beach. Kapoor, as part of his plea deal, admitted stealing those condo deposits and others made by about 30 buyers in URBIN’s condo project, Commodore Plaza, in Coconut Grove.
Miami attorney Jay Tome, who represents 30 condo buyers in the Miami Beach project and another 10 in the Grove project, said he was grateful that his clients will receive the 10% guarantee on each of their deposits — meaning that if someone bought a unit for $300,000, the purchaser will receive a $30,000 payment from the bond fund. But he pointed out that most of the buyers had put down full deposits and collectively have lost millions of dollars to Kapoor’s theft.
“My folks were victims of this fraud, too,” Tome said. “We’re an unsecured creditor just like the investors are unsecured creditors. It will be up to the judge to decide how any recovered money is distributed.”
As the receiver in the SEC case, Lee’s main task is to recover money for investors. Now that she has nearly completed the sale of Location Ventures and URBIN assets, she is turning her sights on filing lawsuits against third parties, including investors, who might have received “preferential” payments from Kapoor before the SEC sued him.
This week, Becerra ordered Lee to file a brief under seal by Monday informing the judge of her plans to sue third parties with the aim of recovering money for investors and distributing it fairly among them. This is known as the “clawback” phase in the SEC case.
Among Lee’s likely clawback targets: a wealthy New York couple, Alex Kleyner and Diana Ulis, who were major investors in Location Ventures and two of its projects in Coral Gables and Fort Lauderdale before they had a falling out with Kapoor in late 2022. They reached a contract agreement with him to buy out their initial $45 million investment, but Kapoor returned only $20 million. Kleyner, who heads a company called National Debt Relief, and Ulis sought the balance in a lawsuit against Kapoor.
In his plea agreement in the federal case, Kapoor admitted that he misappropriated millions of dollars in loans to the Coconut Grove project — money that he used to repay the couple, who sat on Location Ventures’ board.
Alan Kluger, a Miami lawyer who represents Kleyner and Ulis, declined to comment when asked by a Miami Herald reporter about the couple’s investments and their suit against Kapoor. Their civil case has been on hold since the SEC sued him and his development companies.
If Lee, the receiver, proceeds with a lawsuit against the couple claiming they received “preferential” treatment from Kapoor, it is possible she could recover some of his $20 million payment to them and redistribute part of those funds to other investors.
At this point, it is not clear who else might be targeted by Lee in a clawback action. Kleyner and Ulis were by far the largest investors in Location Ventures and its development projects.
Once Lee completes the clawback phase, a process that could take months, she will make the final fund distributions to the investors in Location Ventures and URBIN.
Legal turning point
One of the turning points over Kapoor’s mishandling of investors’ funds was revealed in July 2023 — before the filing of the SEC case and his indictment — when a former Location Ventures executive said in a deposition that Kapoor improperly moved millions of dollars in loans intended for a Miami condo project to a different corporate account so that he could use the money to buy out the two disgruntled major investors, Kleyner and Ulis.
Greg Brooks, the former chief financial officer at Location Ventures, said in the deposition that Kapoor obtained two private loans that totaled $12 million and were supposed to be for the Coconut Grove project. Brooks said the developer instead diverted the loans to help him purchase the equity interests of the New York couple who had invested in his company.
The loan debt, however, remained on the Grove project’s books — though that entity never received the funds, Brooks said.
“It was an improper use of funds,” Brooks said in the deposition taken as part of a lawsuit filed by attorney Darrin Gursky on behalf of a group of minority investors in the Grove project. Brooks added in his sworn testimony that he didn’t know if Kapoor “was intending to defraud the Coconut Grove investors.”
Brooks, who worked as Location Ventures CFO from his hiring in August 2022 to his firing in March 2023, testified under oath that he was contacted by the SEC, Internal Revenue Service and FBI for their civil and criminal investigations into Kapoor and his development dealings.
In July 2023, Kapoor was forced to step down as Location Ventures’ CEO as the company’s board of directors installed an interim leader, a former Miami-Dade circuit court judge, to assess its assets and liabilities while considering liquidations. Meanwhile, several lawsuits were filed by lenders, investors and others seeking millions of dollars in damages, further complicating the future of the once high-flying real-estate company.
Brooks, a CPA who had previously worked as a financial officer on Wall Street, drew attention to Kapoor and Location Ventures in May 2023 when he sued the company for back pay and other compensation. The lawsuit resulted in a $150,000 settlement agreement, according to court records. In the suit, Brooks not only accused Kapoor of financial improprieties as the firm’s CEO, but he also revealed that Location Ventures, through its URBIN subsidiary, was paying then-Miami Mayor Francis Suarez a $10,000-a-month consulting fee for “unknown services.”
The Miami Herald later reported that Suarez’s mayoral staff helped Kapoor cut through red tape at City Hall to obtain permits for URBIN’s mixed-used condo project in the Grove at the same that the firm was paying the mayor more than $200,000 from July 2021 to March 2023, according to the company’s financial statements and other records examined by the Herald. Suarez has said his work for Kapoor was unrelated to his official duties and that he was unaware his staff helped the developer navigate issues with the city’s zoning office.
Suarez, who left office at the end of 2025, said his consulting job with Location Ventures was to help find investors for Kapoor’s development projects and said he did nothing wrong. He has not been charged in the federal criminal case.
Kapoor also had a business relationship with Coral Gables Mayor Vince Lago, who along with several associates purchased a storefront in May of 2022 across the street from a planned Location Ventures condo development site on Ponce de Leon Boulevard and leased it to the company as a future sales center for roughly $12,400 a month. Lago told the Herald that he and his partners were “approached by several potential tenants,” and the development company’s attorney said the lease was market rate.
The mayor disclosed the arrangement when he recused himself from the first of several City Commission votes on the project.
Lago also registered his real estate license with the boutique firm that received a $640,000 commission from the sale of the Ponce de Leon property to Location Ventures.
Lago has said he was not involved in the transaction and received no money from it.
Federal fraud indictment
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Florida said that while Kapoor raised about $89 million from investors, most of his promised real estate projects were never built. Despite being entitled to a capped salary of $400,000 plus certain fees, Kapoor diverted substantially more funds for personal use, including the purchase of a 68-foot yacht and a residence in Cocoplum.
Prosecutors further alleged that Kapoor misrepresented to investors the amount that he had personally contributed to Location Ventures, claiming he and his business partner and family had invested $13 million, when, in reality, they contributed roughly half of that amount.
He was also accused of deceiving escrow agents to secure the release of pre-construction condo deposits and then misappropriated those funds for personal expenses unrelated to the developments. As a result, condo projects in Coconut Grove and Miami Beach were never built.
In total, Kapoor received more than $6 million of illicit income from Location Ventures and its projects between 2018 and 2023, according to a factual statement filed with his plea agreement.
For example, prosecutors alleged that Kapoor withheld payroll taxes from employees but failed to turn that money over to the government, effectively stealing from his own employees. Instead of remitting those taxes to the IRS, prosecutors said Kapoor diverted about $1.3 million in payroll taxes from company accounts for his personal benefit.
Kapoor pleaded guilty to a conspiracy to defraud the United States for failing to remit his employees’ payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare benefits between 2020 and 2022. (He also did not file personal income-tax returns for the years 2019-2023, according to the indictment. He is required to resolve his tax obligations with the IRS.)
Kapoor also pleaded guilty to one money-laundering charge accusing him of transferring $820,559 from his personal bank account as a down payment on a $5 million purchase of a 68-foot Princess yacht on Aug. 15, 2022.
Kapoor, a University of Miami business-school and law-school graduate, faces at least 10 years in prison at his sentencing in August before U.S. District Judge Michael Moore.
In November 2024, he reached a settlement agreement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to resolve a lawsuit claiming he defrauded dozens of investors in his companies’ projects. But both sides failed to reach an agreement on how much Kapoor must compensate them.
