A failed flip on the Upper East Side has ensnared a once-busy developer.
Russian-born developer and art collector Janna Bullock is accused of defaulting on an $8 million loan backed by 14 East 82nd Street, a 9,500-square-foot prewar townhouse she once owned and converted into a single-family home, according to a complaint filed Thursday in Manhattan Supreme Court. The lawsuit also names the property’s owner, Zoya Kuznetsova, as a defendant, Crain’s reported.
The debt was issued by Antonia Ventures LLC, a shell company linked to Downtown Investment Advisory, a White Plains-based asset manager. The suit claims no payments have been made since February. Bullock personally guaranteed the loan, which means she’s on the hook even though she sold the building more than a decade ago.
Bullock bought the six-story property for $12.2 million in 2006 from Aby Rosen’s RFR Holding, intending to gut-renovate it into a single residence. But construction stalled, leaving the property boarded up with a stop-work order still in place.
In 2012, she unloaded the townhouse at a loss for $9.1 million to Kuznetsova, a close associate who, according to society photos and past filings, has family ties to Bullock’s ex-husband, Alexey Kuznetsov, a former Russian government official.
Kuznetsova has since struggled to keep the building out of foreclosure. Last year, the property narrowly avoided auction after she secured emergency financing — the same loan now in dispute. The lender’s complaint signals that the lifeline may have run out.
Bullock, a onetime Guggenheim board member known for flipping Gilded Age townhouses into luxury single-family homes, was among the Upper East Side’s most active redevelopers in the mid-2000s.
Her projects included 54 East 64th Street, the onetime New York Observer offices, which she bought for $9.5 million in 2004 and resold for $18.7 million two years later, and 9 East 67th Street, which she flipped for roughly $25 million in 2009.
Bullock and Kuznetsov were convicted in absentia by a Russian court in 2018 for allegedly embezzling public funds, though both denied the charges.
Kuznetsov was extradited from France to serve his sentence; Bullock remains abroad.
Neither Bullock nor Kuznetsova could be reached for comment.
— Holden Walter-Warner
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