For years Kapur lived in a two-bedroom condo at 415 Greenwich St., No. 8E. The condominium is a converted former tea factory in Tribeca’s historic district.
Last winter she decided to sell, according to the suit.
That is when Riccio began negotiating with Kapur’s next-door neighbors, in No. 8F, about a deal for her apartment.
He was able to get them to increase their offer, to $3.2 million from $2.9 million, he said. And around the same time, Kapur inked a contract with Riccio to exclusively list her place.
But when Kapur learned that the neighbors, Scott Levy and Michelle Stocknoff, were the intended buyers, she fired Riccio, the suit says. Kapur ultimately did sell the apartment to Levy and Stocknoff in December for $3.6 million, records show.
Firing Riccio was “a device used in bad faith to escape liability” and “no coincidence,” the suit says, because “the ultimate purchaser is the same as the neighbor-buyers.”
Kapur and her husband, Sunjay, who own properties around the world, have left the country to avoid their debt, the suit alleges.
Indeed, the couple’s current apartment, at 1 West End Ave., is empty, according to an investigator hired by the plaintiffs. (The Kapurs bought their four-bedroom condo there in June for $7.8 million.) In May, Sunjay attended a circus in England, according to a tweet he sent, the investigator said.
Riccio and Elliman have asked Levy and Stocknoff for help in tracking down Kapur, because they “are likely to have in their closing file [the] defendant’s last known address,” according to Thursday’s filing in state Supreme Court in Manhattan. An email message sent to Levy was not returned.
Kapur says in legal documents that because a “trust” has partial ownership of No. 8E, and the trust did not want to sell, the contract with Riccio was essentially meaningless.
In 2010 Kapur moved into 415 Greenwich. At the time she was married to Vikram Chatwal, an actor and entrepreneur who helped his father develop the Dream hotels as well as the Night and Time chains. Chatwal’s father helped the couple buy the apartment through a trust, according to a deed. The price, $2.4 million, appears to have been paid in cash.
But the next year the couple, who were fixtures of New York’s downtown nightlife, divorced. Afterward, Priya Kapur kept the Tribeca apartment, though Sant Singh Chatwal’s name has remained on the deed. “The property belongs to Priya Kapur and a trust for the benefit of her daughter,” said Katie Fontana, a spokeswoman for the Dream Hotel Group. “Mr. Sant Singh Chatwal is a trustee of the granddaughter’s trust and has no ownership interest in the property and was not involved in the sale.”
Kapur, for her part, seems to have struggled financially, missing years of condo payments. In fact, 415 Greenwich’s board slapped liens on her on four occasions, with one, in 2019, totaling $23,500 in missed payments and fees, according to tax records. She did, however, settle her bills before selling.
In 1995 Sant Singh Chatwal, who emigrated from India, founded Hampshire Hotels and Resorts, the precursor of Dream. He has become entangled in court cases himself. In 2014 he pleaded guilty to funneling $188,000 to Democratic Party candidates by using straw donors to evade donation limits, a crime for which he received three years’ probation.
Riccio had no comment, and a spokesman for Douglas Elliman declined to comment on pending litigation. Michael Cole, Riccio and Elliman’s attorney, did not return a call. The Kapurs also could not be reached.
The Chatwals control several properties in New York, including a pair of Dream hotels on West 16th Street and West 55th Street; a Time hotel on West 49th Street; and a Chatwal on West 44th Street. The company unveiled a new resort this year in the Catskills.
The company is aggressively adding Dream hotels across the country, with planned locations in Kentucky, Ohio and Oklahoma—which would join existing outposts in California, Florida and North Carolina.
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