Afiniti founder ordered to appear as court freezes assets
Zia Chishti, the founder of Afiniti, has been ordered to appear before the Registrar of the Supreme Court of Bermuda for an oral examination on November 5, as part of enforcement proceedings brought by VCP Capital Markets LLC, the loan agent for Afiniti’s secured lenders.
The order follows a ruling by Puisne Judge Andrew Martin on September 22, granting VCP a worldwide freezing order over assets held by Mr Chishti and his wife, Sarah Pobereskin, up to $570,502, pending payment of a costs award related to Afiniti’s 2024 restructuring.
The court found “solid evidence of a real risk” that Mr Chishti might dissipate his assets after failing to pay an interim order of $366,891.01 owed to VCP, part of a larger costs liability stemming from last year’s liquidation proceedings. The total sum sought, including enforcement costs and interest, exceeds half a million dollars.
VCP argued that Mr Chishti had transferred more than $43 million in cash to Ms Pobereskin over three years, including $25 million used to buy shares in TRG Pakistan Ltd, while owing substantial debts, including $10.3 million to the United States Internal Revenue Service and a $7 million loan to JS Bank.
The court agreed that the TRG-P shares acquired by Ms Pobereskin were likely beneficially owned and controlled by Mr Chishti, citing findings in a 2025 Judicial Arbitration and Mediation Services arbitration confirmed by the US District Court in New York.
Both Mr Chishti and Ms Pobereskin have been restrained from disposing of assets below the threshold value pending a further inter partes hearing set for November 25, when the injunctions may be varied or discharged.
The case forms part of a broader legal fallout from Afiniti Ltd’s Bermuda restructuring, approved in late 2024 after the AI firm’s liquidity crisis.
Afiniti, founded by Mr Chishti in 2006, had once presented itself as a Bermuda success story. In January 2021, Mr Chishti told The Royal Gazette that he had “moved here full-time … We are now up to about 65 full-time staff … the plan is 1,000 in Bermuda in five years,” adding that the company could one day account for 10 per cent of Bermuda’s GDP.
By late 2021, however, Afiniti was rocked by allegations of sexual misconduct. Former employee Tatiana Spottiswoode told an American congressional committee that Mr Chishti “pressured her into having sex on a business trip to Brazil … leaving her with scratches, cuts and contusions”. He strongly denied the allegations. He resigned as chairman and CEO days later.
In December 2023, Mr Chishti sought court-ordered indemnification of legal expenses from Afiniti, which the company opposed.
By December 2024, the Supreme Court granted a winding-up order, finding that Afiniti had “no revenue-producing assets … and is clearly unable to pay its debts”.
The company was placed into provisional liquidation in Bermuda in November 2024 for restructuring purposes after a “liquidity and leverage crisis”. The restructuring involved transferring Afiniti’s undertaking to a new company and reorganising debt and equity in agreement with secured lenders. The judge appointed Michael Morrison and Charles Thresh as joint provisional liquidators, with unlimited powers to manage the company’s affairs.
Mr Chishti appealed the ruling, but in a Court of Appeal judgment dated April 4 and published May 5, the court denied the appeal. Justice Ian Kawaley, sitting as a single judge, ruled there were no realistic prospects of success to overturn the Supreme Court’s approval of the restructuring.
Justice Kawaley found the company was “hopelessly insolvent,” with secured lenders “in the driving seat,” adding that “restructurings typically offer a better return to creditors than a winding-up”. He rejected Mr Chishti’s claim that the deal unfairly prejudiced his rights under a personal indemnity agreement, ruling that the transaction was “in the best interests of the company’s creditors overall”.
The judge noted that Mr Chishti’s assertion that Afiniti was not insolvent “stretches the boundaries of credulity to breaking point … is ‘pie in the sky’.” He emphasised that insolvency courts defer to professional liquidators’ commercial judgment and “ordinarily rely upon rather than second-guess the business judgment of professional liquidators”. No independent creditors objected to the restructuring.
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• For the recent court filings in the case, see Related Media
