What started as a bathroom plumbing dispute inside a tony Upper East Side co-op has exploded into a courtroom brawl over alleged forged audits and suspect bookkeeping. Two residents of 907 Fifth Avenue say a pipe fight snowballed into a full-blown financial scandal and are asking a judge to unwind years of the building's accounting, retroactive to Dec. 31, 2019. They are seeking both compensatory and punitive damages.
What the plaintiffs allege
According to reporting in the New York Post, plaintiffs Angelo Chan and Frederick Wertheim accuse the 907 Fifth Avenue cooperative corporation and its board of failing to provide audited financial statements since 2020. Instead, the complaint claims, shareholders were given documents that carried what appeared to be forged Marks Paneth letterhead and signatures.
The suit, filed in New York County Supreme Court, also alleges that legal fees were listed as negligible even while the building was enmeshed in litigation. On top of that, Chan and Wertheim say they have gone years without running water in two bathrooms because of an unresolved renovation dispute. The complaint states that the pair bought their roughly 2,500-square-foot apartment in 2018 for about $5.2 million.
Board documents and an accountant's name
The residents say co-op materials that bore the name of accounting firm Marks Paneth "appeared fraudulent." CBIZ, which acquired Marks Paneth's assets in 2022, told reporters that "Marks Paneth did not issue the reports," according to the complaint and an email quoted in coverage. Plaintiff counsel told the New York Post that the alleged falsification of these kinds of documents ranks as "one of the gravest injustices" he has had to confront in his practice.
A long-running plumbing fight
The financial accusations are rooted in a much more literal headache: the building's century-old plumbing. A 2022 Appellate Division opinion traces earlier rounds of litigation between residents and the board over efforts to reroute a waste line and the resulting service interruptions. That decision reversed a lower court injunction and laid out the board's authority to direct repair work. The opinion and related docket are part of the public record in the New York courts and can be read in the Appellate Division decision.
Why the address matters
907 Fifth Avenue is a landmarked, prewar cooperative sitting at Fifth Avenue and East 72nd Street, with Central Park views and a long list of affluent owners. Real estate records for the building show that a 12th-floor apartment sold for $37.5 million in 2025, a datapoint that underscores just how high the stakes can be when shareholders start to question a board's books. Those sales figures and the building's ownership history are outlined in research compiled by the Roebling Team.
Legal stakes and next steps
The complaint asks the court to find that records were forged or improperly altered and, if so, to roll back related board actions, order a forensic accounting, and award damages for breach of fiduciary duty. CBIZ's 2022 acquisition of Marks Paneth is a documented transaction, described in CBIZ public materials, and it sits in the background of the fight over who is responsible for any disputed accounting paperwork.
The case is now pending in New York County Supreme Court in Manhattan, the civil trial court that regularly handles complex commercial disputes. If the lawsuit moves past the initial pleadings stage, the most closely watched developments are likely to be document production, including audited statements and engagement letters, and the court's rulings on how much access shareholders have to the co-op's records. Filings and public records will tell the story of what happens next as the litigation progresses.
