Photo: Jeff Spicer/Jeff Spicer/Getty Images
We found theft in a hopeless boondoggle! Allegedly, of course. Billboard reported on Monday that Calvin Harris (whose real name is Adam Wiles), the celebrity DJ best known for his work on hits like “We Found Love,” has accused his longtime financial adviser Thomas St. John of stealing $22.5 million to fund a shady real-estate project.
According to Billboard, Harris and St. John have been in arbitration since June. In his arbitration demand, the Scottish DJ accused St. John and his co-conspirators of breach of contract, fraud, and malpractice. People reported that St. John convinced Harris to invest in CMNTY Culture Campus, a 460,000-square-foot real-estate development “in the heart of Hollywood, California, for musicians, recording engineers, entertainers, and creatives, and was to include recording studios, artists’ lounges, and office space,” according to the arbitration demand. The project, which had been in the works since around 2020, reportedly ran out of cash in 2023, at which point St. John went to Harris for an investment.
Things get very murky from there. In the demand, Harris’s attorneys claim that St. John gave his client no information about the project, but just sent over Docusign forms that were “materially misleading.” St. John then allegedly created Claimant Lewsi LLC, through which he signed over $22.5 million to the development in Harris’s name. Of that, $10 million was a loan that Harris claims was never paid back and $12.5 million was an equity stake in the project, which Harris says in his arbitration demand “has been, at best, a complete boondoggle, and, at worst, a complete fraud.”
“Mr. Wiles has not received a single penny in return for that investment, and, indeed, respondents have not even started developing or building the project,” reads the arbitration demand. “In fact, shortly after Mr. Wiles purportedly made this $12.5 million investment, [St. John] … distributed over $11 million dollars to himself.”
“To this day, Claimants do not know where Claimants’ investment has gone or what it has been used for,” Harris’s attorneys wrote, per Variety. “In any event, Respondents had no intention of Mr. Wiles actually receiving back the full value of his investment, through distributions or otherwise.”
Sasha Frid, a lawyer for St. John, told The Cut in a statement that his client denies any wrongdoing. “Wiles actively pursued this development opportunity. Unhappy with the pace of the project, he chose to pursue private arbitration to assert his discontent,” Frid said. “It’s no secret that, due to interest rates and other market factors, real estate projects are taking longer to build. But the development is very much viable, and expected to have a $900+ million valuation when completed.”
According to Variety, shortly after filing his arbitration demand, Harris’s attorneys discovered that the financial situation of St. John’s project is “deteriorating.” As part of the arbitration process, both parties agreed to a temporary injunction that freezes certain assets of the project while they are still in arbitration. On Friday, Harris filed a petition in Los Angeles Superior Court to uphold that injunction, which brought their private legal battle into the public eye. What a mess.
The Cut has reached out to a representative for Harris and will update this post if we hear back.
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