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Dallas

Developer facing lawsuit over $655M Fort Worth project

Plaintiffs say Dirk Foo failed to disperse over $44.6 million to investors and allegedly skimmed $1M for himself

A Fort Worth developer is accused of cheating his investors out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and allegedly stealing at least $1 million.

Foo Tiang Meng Dirk Robert — president of Fort Worth-based Serene Country Homes and colloquially known as “Dirk Foo” — is facing a lawsuit over a $655 million residential project that was meant to be built into a 2,385-unit community in Fort Worth called Sendera Ranch. The suit claims that Foo breached his fiduciary duty on the project by failing to disperse over $44.6 million to beneficiaries and illegally keeping more than $1 million for himself.

In June 2015, an entity created by Foo called Sendera Ranch A2A Developments, LLC, conveyed about 895 acres of land in Denton and Wise counties to Foo as the trustee of the Sendera Ranch Trust, in order to build a development dubbed Sendera Ranch.

A2A Capital Management — which shares an address with Sendera Ranch A2A Developments, LLC — is the entity Foo uses for overseas operations, which includes facilitating green cards for foreign investors who create jobs in the U.S. through the federal EB-5 program.

Two of his EB-5 clients are the plaintiffs in this lawsuit: Yean Wee Hum and Siew Pan Teo, two Singaporean investors who each paid $40,000.00 for a fractional interest in the property, according to court documents.

After buying the land, Foo set up a blockchain-based digital token platform in 2018 to raise the necessary $655 million to begin construction.

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The contracts Foo signed with Hum and Teo required him to distribute all net income made in any sale of the property trust according to the terms of the agreement. And when the still-unbuilt property sold for $18 million in April 2021, Foo claimed the plaintiffs were each entitled to $6,738 per undivided fractional interest (UFI) units they owned.

However, the plaintiffs claim that the agreement says they were actually entitled to $73,375 each. Furthermore, Foo needed to disburse the trust’s unused funds, amounting to $196,167 each.

As of August of this year, Yean Wee Hum has received only $53,908.64, and Siew Pan Teo has still not received anything.

The closing documents of the land sale show that all of the net proceeds were wired to an entity called Serene Sendera Ranch, LP, which then transferred more than $1 million into Dirk Foo’s overseas accounts. Where the rest of the money went is currently unknown.

This is not the first time Serene has come under legal fire for allegedly scamming investors, as homeowners in two previous communities built by Serene — Trails at Fossil Creek and Hills at Windridge — both claimed that after signing a contract with the company, there was both a lack of communication and the construction of homes was delayed and many are still left unfinished.

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Dallas-Fort WorthLawsuit