As their office building in Uptown appears destined for foreclosure, too doomed even for a receiver to save, a real estate investor is accusing his protege of skimming money off the top of their many business ventures and then frivolously suing him when he refused a buyout.
Matt Tambor’s allegations, tucked inside a June 18 countersuit, further intensify the yearslong dispute between himself and Aviv Rubin that has already forced a sell-off of most of their real estate and put that three-story building at 1640 Grant St. on a perilous path.
“We thought we had a resolution. Turns out, we didn’t,” Rubin attorney Brad Schacht told an Arapahoe County judge June 12. “This is not the first time this has happened in this case. It is the nature of two owners of a small, closely held business not seeing eye to eye.”
“The Grant Street loan comes due in July. We thought we had a deal to resolve that,” he explained. “Now, because of the passage of time, and because we are literally at the eleventh hour before the due date of the Grant loan, appointing a receiver may do more harm than good.
“Either the two are going to come together or they’re not and they’ll suffer the consequences.”
Rubin and his mentor Tambor bought the building at 1640 Grant for $2.6 million in 2019, one of 15 properties they purchased. Only two remain: it and a building in Colorado Springs.
By 2022, the business partners were no longer getting along. Each has come to accuse the other of stealing from their joint ventures and each, at times, has sought a receivership.
“I agree that an appointment of a receiver over the Grant property would not appear to facilitate anything in a productive matter, at least at this point,” Judge Thomas Henderson IV said at the June 12 hearing. “In fact, it would probably cost money that is best spent elsewhere.”
Rubin said Tambor pocketed proceeds from the sale of 805 Wadsworth Blvd. in Lakewood, which Tambor denies. Tambor, in turn, accused Rubin in this month’s countersuit of repeatedly using company funds to buy stakes in their real estate ventures for Rubin and his relatives.
“In other words, the Rubins ‘paid’ Tambor in part with his own money,” the countersuit claims.
Tambor said his tiff with Rubin began when Tambor declined to buy Rubin out of their real estate at what Tambor believed was an inflated price. Rubin then sued and made dire warnings about the properties, which Tambor said were run well by Peter Katz of Trybe Property Management.
“If the Rubins’ decision to pursue their claims against Tambor was about money, increasing profits and limiting losses, it would make little sense,” Tambor says of Aviv and two other Rubin investors. “But that is not why the Rubins sued Tambor. Rather, the Rubins had an ulterior motive: to punish Tambor for his refusal to agree to unreasonable buyout demands.
“By filing this lawsuit against Tambor and seeking a receiver, the Rubins seek to accomplish a purpose for which the Colorado court system was never intended: retaliation.”
Tambor is suing Aviv, Tal and Yael Rubin for abuse of the legal process, theft, breach of fiduciary duty, unjust enrichment and fraud. His lawyer is Michael Schlepp of S&D Law.
“We deny all of these counterclaims,” Aviv Rubin told BusinessDen by email.
