Chicago multifamily titan Steve Ivankovich jousts with bank, lenders

Investor who angled to save Spire tower and failed now owes $4.5M to Hong Kong firms

Atlas Residential's Steve Ivankovich (Getty; GRI Club)
Atlas Residential's Steve Ivankovich (Getty; GRI Club)

These aren’t the dollars you’re looking for.

That’s what Steve Ivankovich’s Chicago-based real estate firm Atlas Residential is trying to convince Hong Kong-based lenders seeking $4.5 million from the longtime investor, and his bank that he’s suing. Atlas is a stepchild of Alliance Holdings, once the nation’s ninth largest apartment owner in the mid-2000s. Ivankovich will have to make his stand against the bank, Stifel, in Illinois after a lawsuit he filed against the financial institution earlier this year in Florida was transferred to a Chicago-area federal court last month.

He’s familiar with sticky real estate disputes, having once made a last-minute attempt in 2014 to save a residential skyscraper plan known as the Chicago Spire. That building would have risen 2,000 feet in Streeterville, though he ultimately failed to bring the project out of bankruptcy before the property fell into the hands of Related Midwest, which has made new plans for the site.

In his latest legal maneuvers, Ivankovich last year lost a separate lawsuit filed by Hong Kong-based Zhu Zhai Holdings and Peter Pui Tak Lee over $3 million in loans that the investor personally guaranteed and allegedly never repaid except for minimal interest.

After a judgment was entered against Ivankovich ordering him to pay Zhu Zhai and Lee $4.5 million — amounting to the loans’ original debt, plus fees and interest — he turned around and sued Stifel for freezing funds and disclosing financial information of accounts of several limited liability companies with ties to Atlas that Ivankovich controls. The bank locked the accounts after it was given notice of the judgment as Zhu Zhai attempted to collect the debt.

The companies under Ivankovich’s control, however, are not on the hook for repayment, their attorneys argue. That’s because they include funds from other investors in real estate ventures involving Ivankovich and his firm, Atlas, which owns dozens of apartment communities in Texas, including the Dallas area, as well as Florida and the United Kingdom, according to its website. The freeze on the accounts was lifted earlier this year by court order, legal documents show.

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“If Stifel could do this to a company like Atlas, they could do this to anybody,” said Jason M. Wandner, a Miami-based lawyer representing the Atlas companies and LLCs tied to Ivankovich. He added that Zhu Zhai “sought payment from entities that were not in debt to them and Stifel violated these third party entities’ privacy and held their money.”

Stifel and its attorneys didn’t return requests for comment. An attorney for Zhu Zhai declined to comment. Prior to the case’s transfer to Illinois, Stifel asked the Florida court to dismiss the case filed by the Atlas companies, calling their lawsuit against the bank “an attempt to forum shop … and to evade collection by preventing the judgment creditor from discovering non-exempt assets held by third parties like Stifel.”

The lenders are still working to collect the $4.5 million judgment. In their initial lawsuit filed in 2020 that resulted in the judgment against Ivankovich and his unsuccessful appeals, Zhu Zhai and Lee called the Atlas CEO’s actions a “clear-cut case for breach of unambiguous guaranty agreements and for fraud.”

They claimed that Ivankovich told them he would soon be transforming Atlas Acquisitions into a publicly traded company and needed the $3 million for pre-IPO expenses before the company was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

“But these representations were false,” the lawsuit said. “Ivankovich misrepresented the size and financial strength of the Atlas Organization, and now is no longer pursuing an IPO for the foreseeable future.”

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