- Key insight: A bankruptcy motion filed April 20 names Tieks CEO Kfir Gavrieli — never mentioned in federal filings — as a previously unidentified recruiter of fake customers behind Aspiration’s revenue fraud.
- What’s at stake: If credited, the motion reframes the fraud from one man cooking books to a friends-and-family recruitment network, raising the prospect of civil exposure for others who haven’t been charged.
- Forward look: A Los Angeles bankruptcy court will hold a hearing May 12 on whether the new allegations can be added to the case.
Overview bullets generated by AI with editorial review.
Processing Content
A recent court filing accuses the CEO of a high-end ballet flat brand of orchestrating part of the fake-customer network that inflated the revenue of
Gavrieli’s sister, Dikla Gavrieli Unatin, filed the motion in a case she has pursued against her brother since February 2021 over control of Gavrieli Brands, the parent company of Tieks.
The April 20 filing is her bid for a fourth amended complaint. The defense has argued she is using the case as a vehicle for delay. The court has previously sanctioned her side over a deposition walkout.
The court will decide on May 12 whether the new allegations can be added to the case (a procedural decision, not a ruling on whether they are true).
The filing alleges Gavrieli received a $36.5 million revolving credit line from Aspiration co-founder Joseph Sanberg as compensation for arranging the fraudulent contracts.
The line was unsecured and fully subordinated, meaning Sanberg had agreed to be repaid only after every other creditor in Gavrieli’s bankruptcy plan was paid in full.
The credit line anchored Gavrieli’s 2021 personal bankruptcy plan.
The trustee of Gavrieli’s bankruptcy plan filed
Federal prosecutors have not criminally charged Gavrieli for his alleged role in the Aspiration revenue fraud; neither the Justice Department nor the Securities and Exchange Commission (both of which have charged Sanberg in the Aspiration case) has publicly named Gavrieli.
In Sanberg’s criminal case in October 2025, the Aspiration co-founder agreed to a
Sanberg’s fraud cleared multiple sophisticated lenders. Clover Private Credit lent $145 million in November 2021, a refinance of an earlier $55 million loan from a different fund. A separate investment manager advanced $16 million as recently as January 2025.
The April 20 motion by Gavrieli’s sister does not portray Sanberg as one man cooking books in private. It portrays a friends-and-family network producing enough real-looking customer signatures to make inflated revenue look like growth.
A hearing on whether to allow the new allegations into the case is set for May 12. Sanberg’s sentencing, convened on April 27 then postponed at the hearing by the judge, is scheduled for June 1.
What the motion alleges Gavrieli did
Sanberg built his fraud on letters of intent, or LOIs, which are non-binding documents in which a potential customer signals its intention to do business with a company.
Between 2021 and 2022, according to
That circular flow generated $44 million in phony revenue in fiscal year 2021 alone, according to the same complaint.
The April 20 motion in the Gavrieli bankruptcy case alleges the Tieks CEO signed two of those LOIs personally.
One, dated Jan. 1, 2021, obligated Gavrieli Brands to pay Aspiration $350,000 a month for “sustainability services.” The motion calls that “an incredible sum for the Company which has no reason to purchase carbon credits.”
A second LOI, signed the same day, committed his father’s small business, Gavrieli Plastics Metal and Sign, to a $50,000 monthly payment. The motion alleges the father may not have known.
The SEC complaint’s redacted list of Aspiration’s LOI customers includes entries labeled “G.B.” and “G.P.M.S.”, matching the initials of the two Gavrieli entities.
The motion further alleges Gavrieli recruited four other LOI customers from his social, family and synagogue circle.
One of these recruits was Young Israel of North Beverly Hills, where the motion alleges Gavrieli has personal ties to the leadership.
Another was ETZ Partners LLC, owned by a man the motion alleges Gavrieli paid roughly $700,000 in Gavrieli Brands funds between 2020 and 2025.
The third was AQP Property Management, owned by a business school classmate.
The fourth was a group of Colombian celebrities; the motion characterizes them, citing Bloomberg’s 2024
The motion also alleges Gavrieli wired $2.5 million directly to Apogee Pacific LLC on Dec. 21, 2020. Prosecutors say this is the Sanberg-controlled entity that funded the round-trip LOI payments.
The wire came six weeks before Gavrieli filed for personal bankruptcy and inside the same window in which the LOIs were dated.
Gavrieli structured the wire as a loan, evidenced by a promissory note dated the same day; a forensic report prepared for his creditors said that note “did not provide a specific date of execution.”
Gavrieli’s only on-record explanation is documented in a December 2025 email reproduced in the motion. After the trustee’s bankruptcy counsel asked about the LOI, Gavrieli’s representative wrote back: “According to Kfir, there was never a contract, the company didn’t pay or receive any money and no deal went into effect.”
The trustee’s April 28 opposition relies on that same response to argue no damages flowed.
What he allegedly got: The $36.5 million Plan Backstop
When Gavrieli filed for Chapter 11 in February 2021 (a month after the LOI dates), his proposed plan was built around a revolving credit facility from RJB Partners, Sanberg’s investment vehicle, with Sanberg’s personal guarantee behind it.
The line was originally $30 million. It eventually grew to $36.5 million.
The unsecured, fully subordinated loan was “the single most important component” of Gavrieli’s bankruptcy plan, according to the chapter 11 trustee’s disclosure statement.
The April 20 motion puts its theory plainly: “Since the very earliest days of Kfir’s bankruptcy case, a simple question has hovered over the proceedings: why did Joseph Sanberg give Kfir the Plan Backstop?”
The motion’s answer: in exchange for Gavrieli’s role in arranging the LOIs that generated the revenue Sanberg used to bring in investors and lenders.
The credit line never had to pay out. RJB Partners’ assets have been liquidated alongside Aspiration’s, and Sanberg’s personal guarantee is worthless.
But the motion argues it served its purpose. It supposedly let Gavrieli keep operational control of Tieks, a brand over which Unatin is attempting to assert control in the adversary proceeding against Gavrieli, for the whole of the nearly five years of litigation that his bankruptcy plan triggered.
When Aspiration filed for bankruptcy in March 2025, its equity holder list included Gavrieli, a relative of his by marriage, two business school classmates, his attorney’s investment vehicle and three members of Aspiration’s own creditors’ committee whom the motion identifies as Gavrieli associates.
The motion argues this overlap is part of the same inducement pattern. The presence of LOI signers on Aspiration’s equity list, it says, “raises the possibility that Sanberg gave them Aspiration stock as an inducement for their participation in the scheme.”
Gavrieli’s response
The trustee’s counsel at Hueston Hennigan filed the April 28 opposition, calling the allegations “wild and implausible speculation” and arguing that Gavrieli’s relationship with Sanberg was a normal investor relationship — the same relationship the Unatins themselves had with Sanberg.
The opposition also notes that one of the people the motion identifies as a Gavrieli connection, attorney Louis R. Miller, is himself a plaintiff suing Sanberg over the Aspiration fraud. That fact alone, the opposition argues, makes him a poor candidate for co-conspirator.
The opposition does not deny that Gavrieli signed the Gavrieli Brands LOI. Instead, it argues nothing came of it.
Relying on the same Dec. 14 email reproduced in the motion, the trustee says Gavrieli Brands “did not pay or receive anything,” so there are no damages to plead.
Unatin has been litigating against her brother since February 2021 over control of Gavrieli Brands, the parent company of Tieks. The case began as a dispute over mismanagement and ownership and has gone through multiple amended complaints.
The April 20 motion is her bid for a fourth amended complaint. The defense has argued she is using the case as a vehicle for delay. The court has previously sanctioned her side over a deposition walkout.
The May 12 hearing concerns whether the new allegations can be added to the case at all (a procedural decision, not a ruling on whether the allegations are true).
American Banker requested comment for this article from Gavrieli’s bankruptcy counsel Jeffrey Reisner of Steptoe LLP; Allison Libeu of Hueston Hennigan, who represents the trustee; and Tieks’s outside PR firm Miller Ink.
Reisner could not be reached. Libeu and Miller Ink did not respond.
What this changes and what’s next
Bloomberg’s July 2024 investigation identified the suspicious LOI customer roster (the synagogue, ETZ Partners, the Colombian celebrities, the unknown LLC) but never connected the entries to a single recruiter.
Unatin’s April 20 motion asserts they all connect to Gavrieli.
KPMG resigned from the Aspiration audit in July 2022, citing “revenue transactions that had characteristics of fraud.” An Aspiration accountant had flagged “related party transactions” internally that March.
The criminal case, the SEC complaint and the Bloomberg investigation each added pieces, but the pattern alleged in Unatin’s motion (that roughly six of the SEC complaint’s 27 LOI customers, including a synagogue, a PR shop, and a property management LLC, trace to a single recruiter’s social orbit) did not surface publicly until her filing.
Other Aspiration investors are pursuing damages of their own. Eleven are plaintiffs in a Los Angeles Superior Court case that has added Steve Ballmer as a defendant, though a Delaware bankruptcy court
Several Serengeti-managed funds are
Ballmer, one of Sanberg’s largest individual victims, called the claims against him “nonsense” through his attorneys in a
American Banker sought comment from GreenFi, the consumer-banking successor to Aspiration’s deposit business, and Catona, the carbon-credits successor.
GreenFi did not respond. A press email address on Catona’s website returned undeliverable. The company has not issued a public statement since February 2025, and both of its co-CEOs at that time have since left.
Three court dates are due in the next month. By May 11, prosecutors are expected to file a fresh sentencing memorandum in the Sanberg case, their first since the April 27 sentencing was convened and postponed.
On May 12, the bankruptcy court will hold a hearing on whether the new Gavrieli allegations will get formally added to the case.
On June 1, Sanberg will be sentenced. Prosecutors are
Any one of those could yield a development over what is, for now, a single unverified motion that a sister made against her brother, who has not been charged in the high-profile fraud case he is accused of facilitating.
