High-tech entrepreneur Moshe Yanai’s debts balloon to $250 million
Court-appointed trustee says liabilities are more than twice earlier estimates, raising questions over asset pledges and creditor priorities.
The personal debts of bankrupt high-tech entrepreneur Moshe Yanai are more than twice as high as initially estimated, totaling approximately 750 million shekels ($250 million), compared with earlier estimates of around 360 million shekels ($120 million).
The figures emerge from a report recently submitted to the court by the trustee overseeing Yanai’s assets, attorney Yariv Shai Yashinovsky. For comparison, the personal debts of businessman Nochi Dankner, for whom banks filed a bankruptcy petition last week, stand at approximately 500 million shekels.
Yanai’s creditors include the Scintilla investment fund; Bank Leumi and Ampa Capital; non-bank lenders such as Shaked Partners, B2B, Michman, and Green Ark; as well as private lenders, including friends and family members, among them the children of game theory professor Yair Tauman.
The report also indicates that earlier asset estimates were overly optimistic. Yanai’s assets are now valued at roughly 100 million shekels, compared with an initial estimate of about $100 million (approximately 300 million shekels) at the time the bankruptcy petition was filed. The trustee noted that even this lower estimate may still prove optimistic.
According to the trustee, preliminary findings raise concerns that, prior to the issuance of the bankruptcy order, as initially claimed by the Scintilla fund, Yanai may have undertaken actions that could constitute prohibited creditor preference or that may have diminished the bankruptcy estate, including entering into additional commitments to creditors.
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Yashinovsky further wrote that, based on initial findings, Yanai appears to have pledged the same assets to multiple creditors, in some cases in conflicting or overlapping arrangements. As a result, several creditors are now asserting claims over the same underlying assets.
The trustee is continuing to investigate these matters, including examining liens and warning notes registered against Yanai’s penthouse in Tel Aviv and his villa in Herzliya, which were tied to non-bank loans he had taken.
In response, Yanai said: “In 2020, as in the story of Job, a chain of unfortunate events began that brought me from a peak to my current low situation. This is not the end of the story. A process underway in the United States will allow me to exit insolvency while repaying all creditors in full, without any haircuts.”
