With Kyko acting as TECx’s “agent and attorney-in-fact,” the Texas foundation sued West Nottingham. North American Capital did not respond to requests for comment. But TECx alleged that school officials “collaborated” to have North American Capital or its CEO buy the school instead, according to the suit. TECx said in the suit it arranged for a company, North American Capital Markets, to assist in financing its purchase of West Nottingham. TECx accused then-school officials of providing “false, incomplete, and misleading” information on the school’s finances, budget and enrollment. But instead, trouble ensued, the suit said. In December 2020, West Nottingham entered an agreement to sell the school to TECx, according to the suit. TECx President Alex Greystoke, who has founded and directed other private schools, said in an interview with The Baltimore Sun that he then visited the campus. TECx said in the suit it was approached in 2019 by a consulting firm about whether it would be interested in buying West Nottingham. Kyko financed a suit filed in January 2022 by TECx Global Education, an Austin, Texas-based foundation, against West Nottingham and two former officials, saying they breached an $8 million contract for TECx to purchase the school. In 2016, after sprawling litigation against a onetime customer that it accused of fraud and racketeering, Kyko was awarded damages of more than $134 million. Kulkarni, 72, is the CEO of Kyko Global, which is based in Toronto and the Bahamas, and provides a range of financing services, including for litigation. How an international businessman came to control a school in a rustic corner of Maryland is a tale full of plot twists and shifting alliances. Kathy Lockhart, a nurse and instructor who graduated in 1974, has criticisms and questions as she stands near the old school at the sprawling 85-acre campus of West Nottingham Academy - founded in 1744 in the community of Colora, near Port Deposit and Conowingo in Cecil County - which faces an uncertain future as it seeks bankruptcy protection.įriday J(Karl Merton Ferron/Baltimore Sun) “Embassies were shut down, so they weren’t doing the interviews required for an F-1 visa,” McGovern said. The number of K-12 students on F-1 visas, which are required to study in the U.S., dropped almost 42% between 20 amid pandemic closures and restrictions, association data show. He hopes some of those students might attend West Nottingham.īoarding schools with high percentages of international students - West Nottingham’s is about 30% - have had to deal with foreign enrollment declining in recent years, falling even more “precipitously” during the pandemic, said Myra McGovern, a vice president with the National Association of Independent Schools. Without his investment, Kulkarni said the school could have gone the way of Oldfields, the 156-year-old all-girls school in Baltimore County that announced in April that it would close.Īnd in fact, he met Friday with a group from Oldfields, where alumni are scrambling to raise funds to try to keep it open. Its endowment, according to its most recent return, for the fiscal year that ended June 2021, had shrunk to about $664,000, from $4.3 million just several years earlier. West Nottingham’s expenses have outstripped its revenues in all but one of 10 recent years, according to the IRS Form 990 returns that are currently available. But the school filed Wednesday in Baltimore’s federal court to reorganize its finances under Chapter 11 - to prevent the money from instead going to creditors, Kulkarni said. Kulkarni said he planned to invest $2 million in the school to keep it open through the next academic year. “Kiran is going to inject capital when the school was a dry sponge,” said Choudhry, a New York-based entrepreneur who graduated from West Nottingham in 1998. The previous board president, Rehan Choudhry, defended the decision as necessary, saying the school’s revenues and donations had been declining for years, creating an unsustainable situation worsened by the coronavirus pandemic and recession. “You don’t get to just give away the school,” said Sayin, who lives in Daytona Beach, Florida. With few details and almost no public documentation of the transfer, some alumni said it felt as if the school was just handed over for nothing. The transaction was characterized not as a sale but a transfer of the school’s management and operating expenses. The previous board of trustees resigned, and Kulkarni, his brother and an associate took their seats.
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