The longtime owners of a Pacific Palisades residential site are trying to claw back the property, after their lender foreclosed on the asset, marking another chapter in decade-long litigation over the two-acre site.
Shlomy and Revital Weingarten, associated with Pacific Panorama LLC, have filed a lawsuit against Kwala, a Nevada-based lender, claiming the lender wrongfully foreclosed on a residential property at 17000 West Sunset Boulevard, according to court records.
Pacific Panorama is claiming that Kwala unlawfully took over the loan from Wells Fargo, and then foreclosed on the property — though it never had the right to do so. The site was listed for sale for $18 million by The Agency in 2022.
The lawsuit alleges that unlike bank-to-bank transfers, whenever a financial institution transfers a loan to a private “investor,” the financial institution must have a California real estate brokerage license. Pacific Panorama claims Wells Fargo didn’t have one when it transferred the loan to Kwala.
Pacific Panorama LLC and attorneys representing the entity did not respond to a request for comment.
“It’s a frivolous lawsuit that has no basis in fact or in law,” Michael Dicecca, an attorney with Tuchman, Jhun and Dicecca representing Kwala, said in a statement to TRD.
The lawsuit is the latest hiccup in a dispute over who owns the site, with litigation going back to 2014. The history of the site’s ownership and debt load is messy: Pacific Panorama acquired the title to the property in 2008 from Gregg Corlyn, an investor.
Corlyn, who told TRD he was no longer involved, took out loans from Wells Fargo on the site starting in 2007, eventually adding up to $6.6 million, according to records. Pacific Panorama never assumed the loans, but when Corlyn was served with a notice of default, Pacific Panorama faced foreclosure.
Kwala has owned an adjacent property — known as the North land in court records — since 2014. Kwala then bought the loan from Wells Fargo in 2022, debt tied to the South parcel.
Kwala LLC got involved in the lawsuit involving the South Land because it owned the adjacent property, referred to as the North Land, since 2014. Wells Fargo gave out a loan on the South Land, and then sold that loan to Kwala in 2022.
The three owners of Kwala LLC are associated with the jewelry industry: Martin Klein, CEO of New York-based Julius Klein Diamonds and Jeff Dienstag, also based in New York, according to public records and a person familiar with the company. Oded Adler was previously associated with Adler Trading Company in Los Angeles, according to Nevada public records.