Gramercy co-ops worth $25 million targeted in international lawsuit

Two luxury cooperatives in the Gramercy Park neighborhood worth a combined $25 million are tied up in a legal action brought by a bank in Iceland that claims a former shareholder and former company executives looted it for more than $2 billion. 

Glitnir Bank, based in Reykjavik, Iceland, accused the investor Jon Asgeir Johannesson and former bank executives of raiding the bank in 2007 and 2008 to prop up their own failing companies, in a lawsuit filed in New York State Supreme Court yesterday.

The bank won an order from a court in London freezing Johannesson’s assets, including co-ops in the neighboring apartment buildings Gramercy Park Hotel at 50 Gramercy Park North and 2 Lexington Avenue, according to information from PropertyShark.com.

Johannesson and his wife Ingibjorg Palmadottir paid $14.2 million for a penthouse in the Gramercy Park Hotel in April 2007 and $10.3 million for unit 16A at 2 Lexington Avenue in December 2006, PropertyShark.com data shows.

Broker and founder of ID Model Management, Paolo Zampolli, sued the couple in February over their allegedly cheap rehabilitation of his $26,000-per-month apartment at the Gramercy Park Hotel.

The new case was filed in New York because the bank raised money through the sale of bank notes to investors in New York and elsewhere, the complaint says. TRD