What's at stake?
One of Fresno's major power brokers is alleged to be in bad financial conditions.
His family's farming company defaulted on $700 million in loans in 2024.
The former chief financial officer of Granville Homes has accused prominent Fresno developer Darius Assemi of raiding his own company — diverting as much as $16 million in corporate cash to secretly buy back a ranch his family had lost to its creditors, using a longtime business associate as a front to keep his name off of public land records.
In a complaint filed June 16 in Fresno County Superior Court, Ryan Toncheff says Assemi fired him this month after he refused to certify financial statements he believed were false and warned that Granville Homes — the privately held homebuilder at the heart of the Assemi family’s collapsing business empire — was insolvent.
“He didn’t want anyone to know what was going on,” said Matthew Ruggles, Toncheff’s attorney. “They’re desperate.”
The suit, which names Granville Homes and Assemi personally along with as many as 50 unnamed “Doe” defendants, brings claims of wrongful termination, whistleblower retaliation, fraud and unfair business practices.
The allegations cut against the posture Assemi has taken throughout his family’s financial unraveling.
When the $700 million default first surfaced in 2024, Assemi wrote on GV Wire — the news outlet he publishes — that Granville Homes was “lead independently” from the family’s agricultural operations and that he did not expect the homebuilder to be affected by the more than $700 million in farm debt now pushing the Assemis into receivership.
The complaint, however, accuses Assemi’s Granville Homes of being closely tied with proceedings of the $700 million farm loan default: using the homebuilding company to get around the agricultural banks trying to recoup their costs.
In a statement texted to Fresnoland, Assemi described Toncheff as a disgruntled employee with performance issues at work and that Granville is a rock-solid business.
“He expected Granville to gift him several homes,” said Assemi. “Granville Homes remains financially healthy.”
His statement acknowledged the financial challenges that the family’s agricultural operations have faced, pointing to his brother, Farid Assemi, as the point person over the finances of those endeavors.
Assemi tried to circumvent $700 million loan default proceedings, suit alleges
At the center of the complaint is a 330-acre tract in southwest Fresno called Mission Ranch — residentially zoned land roughly bounded by Church, Whitesbridge, Marks and Hughes avenues. The Assemis took over the parcel — once the site of Running Horse, a bankrupt golf-and-luxury-home development that Donald Trump toured and tried to buy in 2007 before walking away — and renamed it Mission Ranch.
The family lost Mission Ranch in the wreckage of its farm empire. After the Assemis defaulted on more than $700 million in loans in 2024, a federal judge placed roughly 50,000 acres of distressed farmland under a court-appointed receiver, Lance Miller.
On Jan. 9, Miller sold Mission Ranch for an estimated $14 million to Running Stallion Ranch LLC – an entity incorporated only weeks earlier, in late December, by Nader Malakan, chief executive of Fresno’s Malakan Diamond Co. The sale, first reported by The Fresno Bee, was consented to by the federally chartered lender on the property, the Federal Agricultural Mortgage Corporation, known as Farmer Mac.
Malakan is close to the Assemi family. According to The Fresno Bee, he has been an Assemi business associate for years.
What Toncheff’s complaint alleges is that the money used to buy Mission Ranch from the federal receiver wasn’t Malakan’s. It was Assemi’s.
Malakan did not respond to a request for comment.
Running Stallion, Malakan’s LLC, was a concealed Assemi entity, according to Toncheff. The LLC was a so-called “straw” purchaser, with Assemi supplying the roughly $14 million to $16 million.
The cash, he alleges, came from Granville Homes’ operating accounts. After the sale closed, Toncheff alleges, the membership interests in Running Stallion were quietly transferred to two entities Assemi controls, Photo Finish LLC and Grass Valley Bluffs Inc., making Assemi the effective owner of land his family had defaulted on — while his name stayed off the deed.
“This personal acquisition was done out of a federal court-supervised receivership, circumventing the federally chartered lender, of which conduct Plaintiff reasonably and in good faith believed constituted violations of federal and state law,” the complaint says.
Toncheff says only Assemi could have moved the money. Granville used a dual-control system for outgoing wires: treasury staff could load a transfer into the bank’s platform, but no wire could be released without Assemi’s personal approval.
The millions that funded Mission Ranch, the complaint states, “could not have been transmitted without, and in fact w[ere] released by,” Assemi’s personal approval.
With the ranch back in Assemi’s hands, Toncheff says, he was asked to help arrange new loans to finance construction on it — and refused.
“As a result, and because of Darius Assemi’s gross misconduct, [I] declined to participate in ongoing efforts to arrange new lender financing on the Mission Ranch property,” he wrote in the complaint.
‘Cash-flow insolvent’
The allegation at the core of Toncheff’s suit is that Granville Homes is insolvent — unable to pay its debts as they came due. His confrontation with Assemi about this conclusion, he says, cost him his job.
Toncheff came to Granville in mid-2024 after 22 years in commercial banking, with a Fresno State MBA and a degree from the Stonier Graduate School of Banking at the Wharton School. He says Assemi recruited him with a promise of a path to roughly $300,000 a year within six months — “if that target were not achieved, one of us made a mistake” — and that he accepted a reduced $180,000 salary on the strength of it.
The raise, he says, never came, even after he lined up roughly $100 million in loans for Granville.
Those loans were the problem. Granville, in Toncheff’s telling, had become an octopus of debt: each lender could see only the arm it had loaned against, while the company quietly used its own cash to feed all of the arms. From his vantage as CFO, he could see that the whole Assemi creature carried more debt than it could feasibly service.
“What he’s doing is leveraging other properties to get hard-money loans to pay the other entities,” said Ruggles, Toncheff’s attorney.
Assemi, in his statement, said that the problems stem from the families agricultural operations.
“We have been navigating through difficult financial endeavors created not from our home-building activity but from the fall-out from the demise of the farming operations that I was partner in with my brothers Farid and Farshid.”
Toncheff says he applied the same test a bank uses to size up a borrower — whether the company generates enough cash to cover its loan payments. By that measure, according to Toncheff, Granville is failing.
Counting all obligations carried by other Assemi-related entities, Granville’s coverage was sliding below the break-even line in 2026 and 2027, meaning it would not bring in enough to make its payments.
“[I] concluded, in good-faith reliance on recognized definitions of cash-flow insolvency under the California Uniform Voidable Transactions Act…and Bankruptcy Code, that Granville Homes was cash-flow insolvent.”
On a stricter measure, Toncheff found, it had already fallen through the cushion its loan agreements required — a covenant breach, the kind of violation that can let a lender declare a loan in default and demand its money back at once.
When Toncheff refused to certify statements in Granville’s 2025 CPA review that he believed was inaccurate, the complaint says, Assemi retaliated.
Retaliation
On May 23, in a private meeting, Toncheff told Assemi he believed the company was insolvent and raised concerns about his own legal exposure as CFO. Soon after, he says, he was accused of producing distorted work and frozen out of cash-flow meetings, with subordinates directed to pick apart his analysis.
On May 29, the complaint says, Assemi offered to demote him to “finance manager,” telling him in substance that he could not have a CFO conveying the belief that the company was insolvent. On June 4, Toncheff’s email and system access were cut. On June 10, he was told it was his last day.
“This is a lawsuit filed by a disgruntled former employee of Granville Homes whose work performance did not justify his continued employment,” said Assemi in his statement. “Granville looks forward to continue building homes in the Central Valley for decades to come.”
The lawsuit lands on a family already in financial freefall. The Assemis’ troubles trace to a failed bid to break from Stewart Resnick — America’s wealthiest farmer and the dominant force in California pistachios — and build a rival processing empire called Touchstone.
After that gambit unraveled, the family defaulted on more than $700 million owed to Prudential, PGIM and U.S. Bank, and a federal judge placed its roughly 50,000 acres under Miller’s receivership.
The collapse is now redrawing Fresno’s development map. Last year, when GV Wire disputed Fresnoland’s reporting that Assemi owned land “throughout” the proposed Southeast Development Area, they clarified that he held only a single SEDA parcel. That is now true — because a bank has taken the rest since tax rolls were finalized last spring: roughly 100 acres Assemi owned across SEDA earlier last year are now held by Tri Counties Bank as part of the default proceedings.
Even so, Assemi has spent the past year pressing Mayor Jerry Dyer to keep SEDA alive. At a May 2025 City Hall meeting that Fresnoland attended, with the 9,000-acre project near collapse, Assemi pitched the premiums that new homes could command near Clovis Unified’s new campus — “Clovis Unified has a gorgeous, brand new toy.” Dyer told the assembled developers what he needed from them: “We will need help. As you’ve helped in the past.”
For years, the threats to the Assemi empire came from banks, business rivals, environmentalists and urban reformers.
Now one is coming from inside Assemi’s own house.
