What's at stake:
One of Fresno's biggest suburban home builders is firing counter claims at two whistleblowers who came from the top of Granville's financial team.
On the afternoon of Wednesday, April 8, Aleksey Dvorkin sat down and wrote to the leadership of Granville Homes, one of the largest homebuilders in Fresno, to say that its financial statements could not be relied upon. Granville’s reviewed reports for 2023 and 2024, he wrote, “may have been materially misstated.”
He was the company’s controller, by his own claim the last certified public accountant at Granville, the man whose signature outside accountants were supposed to take as assurance that the books for some of Fresno’s biggest subdivisions were accurate. At the end of the email he asked for whistleblower protection.
He arrived the next morning, according to Fresno County Superior Court documents, to find that his badge no longer opened Granville’s doors. Another employee let him in, where he was ushered into a conference room with Granville’s chief financial officer and the owner of the company, Darius Assemi.
Assemi’s version of the meeting, according to court filings, is a sentence of corporate routine: “on April 9th, I and others met with Dvorkin to discuss his April 8th email and to address his concerns.”
Dvorkin – via the lawsuit he filed in July – says he was “subjected to an hour of unfounded accusations, attacks on his character and threats against his CPA license”– “a classic case of ‘circling the wagon,'” he wrote. When the hour ended nobody told him to leave. By his account he sat in that conference room for the rest of the day: “isolated in the conference room for approximately six hours without any particular purpose.”
The next day, Dvorkin showed up to work and said good morning to one of his colleagues.
The employee responded “Fuck you,” and flipped him off.
Four days later, Dvorkin was fired and Granville filed a lawsuit against him, accusing him of walking off with the company’s confidential files.
Second whistleblower in a year
Dvorkin is the second alleged whistleblower this year to file a complaint against Granville. Two months after that April meeting, Ryan Toncheff, the chief financial officer who was in the conference room, was also out of a job. He ended up suing Granville himself this June.
Toncheff sent his claims to private arbitration last month, according to court filings and his legal team, due to an agreement he signed two weeks after Dvorkin’s marathon meeting with Assemi in April. The agreement stipulates complaints against Granville will be settled in private arbitration – outside of court filings where company emails and other subpoena materials aren’t released publicly.
Assemi could not be reached for comment, but has previously publicly slammed Toncheff. Dvorkin declined to comment.
To understand why two finance executives at a family homebuilder ended up in court at the same time, accusing the company of putting false numbers in front of lenders and the I.R.S., it helps to know what had been happening to the family that owned it.
For a generation, the Assemis were the closest thing Fresno had to a dynasty: tens of thousands of acres of pistachios and almonds on the west side, a homebuilding company with its name on subdivisions across the northern edge of the city, a hand in nearly every political fight that mattered, and – after 2016 – a news outlet, GV Wire, published by Assemi himself.
In the late 2010s, the most lucrative arm of the family’s portfolio started to come apart. The family’s attempt to build its own pistachio-processing plant, in defiance of Stewart Resnick’s grip on the industry, ended badly.
In 2024 the Assemi family defaulted on more than $700 million in agricultural debt owed to Prudential, PGIM, U.S. Bank and others and a federal judge in the Eastern District of California put roughly fifty thousand acres under a court-appointed receiver, Lance Miller, who has been selling the family’s ground off in lots ever since. In a separate and bitter case, one of the family’s own sons sued his father and uncles.
At first, Assemi’s position was that Granville Homes stood apart. When the default first surfaced in Fresnoland, he wrote on GV Wire that the homebuilder was independent of the family’s agricultural operations and that he did not expect it to be affected.
The lawsuit filed by Toncheff, the former chief financial officer, alleged the opposite: that the homebuilder had become the family’s last working checkbook.
Roughly $14 to $16 million dollars in Granville’s corporate cash, Toncheff wrote, went to buy Mission Ranch — three hundred and thirty acres in southwest Fresno, once the site of the failed Running Horse golf development, sold out of the federal receivership in January — through what he called a “concealed nominee or ‘straw’ purchaser.”
The buyer of record was an entity formed weeks before the sale by a longtime associate of the family. Toncheff alleged that after the deal closed, the ownership interests were moved to companies Assemi controlled. The effect he described was a man quietly buying back land his family had lost to its creditors, with money from the one company its creditors could not reach.
After Toncheff’s allegations, Assemi conceded the farm collapse’s fallout had reached Granville. But he denies Toncheff’s core claim: that Granville is running out of cash to pay its debts.
Assemi has said publicly that Toncheff “expected Granville to gift him several homes, give him a large salary increase and percent ownership of the company.” In court, Granville accuses him of misusing the judicial process to extort money, and says he tried to coerce a $540,000 settlement by generating negative publicity.
For example, Assemi’s lawyer claims that Toncheff’s prediction of Granville running out of money by August 2026 was false, because his model “failed to include availability created by paydown of loan from home sales in excess of $10,000,000.”
“Toncheff’s model was a result-oriented instrument, constructed after his grievance was conceived, calibrated to a predetermined number, and dressed in the language of financial analysis to lend false legitimacy to a claim that has no merit,” wrote Howard Sagaser, Assemi’s attorney.
“Granville is not insolvent and will continue in existence for many years in the future,” he concluded in the arbitration demand he served Toncheff in June.
But Dvorkin says he was warned about Granville’s problems before he had properly unpacked.
‘I only report to Darius’
Shortly after he was hired this year, according to court filings, Granville’s human-resources manager told Dvorkin the controller’s job had been a turbulent one; two prior controllers, he wrote, had “depart[ed] under strange circumstances.” The owner of Granville was “very retaliatory and had previously cut employees’ wages and demoted them to lower positions when they didn’t do what he wanted.”
According to Dvorkin, the assistant controller told him that it was only a matter of time before he became aware of these problems. The company, Dvorkin was told, “engages in a lot of inappropriate activities and that, with time, Dvorkin will discover it himself.”
Dvorkin says his arrival was treated as an insult. Meetings were disrupted, he alleges, with remarks like “we don’t need a controller” and “our administrative assistants can do what [Dvorkin] is doing.”
One employee left a meeting room saying “I don’t report to you or anyone else, I only report to Darius.”
What Dvorkin says he discovered within his short time at Granville came down to two items.
The first was a loan. Granville had carried an $800,000 note from a local developer, Gary McDonald, on its books as an asset, Dvorkin alleged, for years after the payments stopped — three years, by his account, without one.
Reached by phone, McDonald said he was unaware there was any dispute.
“I don’t know what they’re doing, to be honest,” he said of Granville.
Asked about the $800,000, he said, “I know nothing about that.”
Told that a current Granville executive had filed a sworn declaration referring to an outstanding loan in his name, he said, “I don’t discuss financial matters with anyone.”
Assemi, according to court documents filed last month, says Dvorkin was “simply wrong” about the loan, and that he has an email anticipating when it will be repaid.
The second item was the website. GV Wire — the outlet Assemi publishes — has accumulated debts to Granville in excess of $3 million, Dvorkin alleged, while losing something on the order of a million dollars a year.
“GV Wire is unlikely, for all intents and purposes, to repay its debts obligations to Granville Homes,” Dvorkin alleges.
“This substantially overstates assets reported by Granville Homes on its financial statements, because it appears to creditors that Granville will be receiving cash from GV Wire, but it never does and is unlikely to.”
Assemi’s answer, according to court filings, is that GV Wire “is a separate legal entity that generates revenue,” that it has employed as many as seven people, and that it “remains essentially a small start up business.”
The missing files?
Dvorkin says April 8 is the day he blew the whistle against Granville – the same day that Granville’s forensic computer experts say he moved confidential data onto a bunch of hard drives.
Breadcrumb, the outside firm Granville hired, reported “at least four” storage devices were inserted into Dvorkin’s company laptop, and found the April 8 activity “consistent with efforts to conceal the transfer of electronic data to external storage devices.”
Dvorkin does not deny taking the files. He says, in his sworn declaration, that he needed them to report the company, and then went to the I.R.S. with the files around April 16.
Because that was two days after Granville fired him, county Superior Court judge Kristi Culver Kapetan last month tentatively denied Dvorkin’s motion to strike Granville’s lawsuit as retaliation. Complaining to your own employer, the court wrote, is not protected activity, and in any event “the unauthorized taking of a company’s confidential documents is not ‘protected activity.'”
Dvorkin’s case is still going, and still public. Granville’s suit against him — trade-secret misappropriation, breach of the duty of loyalty, computer crimes, unfair competition — has tentatively survived Dvorkin’s attempt to kill it. His own claims against Granville and Assemi, for whistleblower retaliation and wrongful termination, are pending.
He has demanded a jury and is seeking punitive damages. The files, the court noted, sit on a computer in the custody of his lawyer.
No court date has been set.
