A landmark downtown LA hotel, $110M in immigrant capital, and a repayment that never landed
A group of foreign investors says a landmark downtown Los Angeles hotel was a losing bet before it opened, and that the developers behind it hid a slow-motion financial collapse.
In a lawsuit filed August 20, 2026 in federal court in Los Angeles, the investors say they each put $500,000 into an EB-5 immigrant-investor offering built around the 350-room Hotel Indigo, part of Greenland's Metropolis complex at 900 Wilshire Boulevard. All told, the filing says, about $110 million came from 220 investors and was lent to a Greenland affiliate to build the hotel. EB-5 is a federal program that lets foreign nationals invest in a US project in exchange for a path to a green card.
The pitch, according to court papers, leaned on Greenland Holding Group's Fortune Global 500 standing and its Shanghai Stock Exchange listing. Investors were promised a slim payoff - an expected cumulative 1% return - with repayment tied to a refinance or sale of the finished hotel. The suit says the loan was backed only by the hotel itself, not by the parent's wider holdings, which included an 858-unit Brooklyn apartment property.
The math, the investors allege, was broken from the start. A March 2015 appraisal put the hotel's "as stabilized" value at $202.2 million, below the $216.5 million the project was disclosed to cost. That gap, the filing says, made repayment from the asset alone "structurally implausible," and the shortfall never made it into the offering documents handed to investors.
The lawsuit also questions the sponsor's integrity. The regional center that sponsored the offering - the entity licensed to pool EB-5 money - and its president were later sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the suit says, over allegations of "misappropriating" more than $12 million from investors in two companion EB-5 deals. According to the filing, a federal court entered a final judgment in that case in November 2018 ordering the return of $24,655,000 in investor money, and immigration authorities pulled the regional center's license in April 2018. Investors say the fund's manager, A&J Capital, still told them their money "had not been misappropriated" and "remained safe."
What followed, the investors claim, was kept from them. Court papers describe Greenland Holding Group's credit ratings sliding toward default across 2021 and 2022, a request to push back a $488 million bond payment, and the "fire-sale" of a neighboring Metropolis apartment tower for $504 million - a loss the suit puts at more than $200 million against cost. During that stretch, the filing says, the hotel backing the loan was listed for sale without a clear heads-up to the people whose money was on the line.
Years past the original five-year loan term, the investors say, none of their capital has come back - more than $4 million in total. Their claims run from federal and state racketeering laws to California securities violations and breach of fiduciary duty, and they are asking the court to undo the investment, or award damages, plus punitive damages of at least $11 million.
For developers who raise EB-5 money, the takeaway sits with disclosure: what a sponsor must tell investors when both a project's economics and a parent company's finances turn south while the capital is still locked in.
None of the allegations has been tested in court. No defendant has filed a response, and no court has ruled on any of the claims.
