A less-redacted court filing in a lawsuit against Mat Ishbia includes new financial details that two Phoenix Suns minority owners say could threaten Ishbia’s majority ownership of the team.
The filing, a copy of which was obtained by ESPN on Tuesday, is from a lawsuit filed Nov. 24 in Delaware State Court by attorneys representing Scott Seldin and Andy Kohlberg, two Suns minority owners. Ishbia’s spokesman said the filing contains “nothing new” and that its claims are “ridiculous.”
The lawsuit against Ishbia accuses him of financial misconduct, including using the team as a “personal piggy bank.” Ishbia, who bought the Suns in 2023, has denied such allegations.
The battles between the Suns minority owners and Ishbia can be traced back to September 2024, when Kohlberg began negotiating a buyout with an adviser to Ishbia. Seldin, meanwhile, didn’t seek a buyout. Kohlberg’s talks continued into 2025, and he asked for a response from Ishbia on June 1.
The next day, Ishbia held a $250 million capital call raise — in which investors are asked to make actual payments on their financial commitments — and “threatened the minority owners with a punitive dilution of their ownership interests” if they failed to fund it by June 12, according to the new filing. As part of the raise, new units of ownership would be issued at $10 million per unit — a figure that Seldin and Kohlberg say was far from the valuation three months prior, when Ishbia bought units of the Suns from minority owners at $198 million per unit.
Under protest, the two minority owners say, they paid their portion of the capital call raise.
According to the filing, Ishbia said the capital call raise wasn’t fully funded and set up another capital call raise on July 8, with another 10-day deadline.
Again, Seldin and Kohlberg say, they paid their portion under protest.
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The two minority owners say they then sought internal financial records and filed a lawsuit in August against Ishbia to obtain them. Seldin and Kohlberg say they were shown a one-page document that claimed a “debt-to-equity conversion” was used to fund a portion of Ishbia’s contribution to the raise. But ultimately, they say, they learned that Ishbia failed to fund both capital call raises by the deadlines he set.
“As a result of Ishbia’s scheme to swap the debt for equity, Ishbia himself accordingly funded none of the new cash by the capital call deadline while the minority owners funded approximately 38% of it, despite owning only 13% of the company,” the filing states.
Under the terms of the team’s operating agreement, Seldin and Kohlberg say, they should have been able to buy the shares Ishbia failed to fund.
In a statement Tuesday, Michael Carlinsky of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, an attorney representing Seldin and Kohlberg, said, “The updated redacted filing shows that the $250 million capital call issued with only ten days’ notice was designed to allow Mat Ishbia to unfairly increase his ownership stake by severely diluting the minority owners. The artificially low valuation of $10 million per unit bears no connection to the true value of the franchise, which Ishbia asserted was worth $7 billion or more in August 2025 based on his own market analysis.
“Now that Ishbia’s failure to fund consistent with the terms of his own capital call has come to light, we believe his ownership stake is at risk of significant dilution from 83.2% to 32.7%.”
For Ishbia’s majority ownership to be in jeopardy, the judge in the lawsuit would need to decide that Ishbia failed to fund the capital call by his own deadline and therefore, per the terms of the operating agreement, Ishbia must offer the minority owners the opportunity to fund his unfunded share at the $10 million per unit price set in his capital call notice.
If that were to happen, Seldin and Kohlberg could take over the majority ownership of the Suns and Phoenix Mercury with a stake of approximately 60%.
“There is nothing new here, and the claims are ridiculous,” a spokesman for Ishbia said in a statement Tuesday. “Unwilling to take responsibility and invest in the team, these guys are resorting to threats and publicity stunts to get Mat to buy them out just so they make more money.”
Seldin and Kohlberg are holdovers from the previous ownership group under Robert Sarver. In 2023, Ishbia bought a 57% controlling stake for $2.28 billion, as ESPN reported then, with the embattled Sarver selling his 37% stake for $1.48 billion. At the time of the sale, 14 of the 16 partners in the Suns’ ownership group accepted Ishbia’s buyout offer at a $4 billion valuation.
Kohlberg and Seldin were the only two who did not sell.
Ishbia countersued the two Suns minority owners in October, saying they insisted he buy out their ownership shares “at an exorbitant premium.”
ESPN previously reported that the Suns sent a letter in August to Kohlberg and Seldin, in which the team said the two men demanded that the Suns buy their ownership share for $825 million, a figure that would put the team’s value at about $6 billion — a 60% increase from the value when Ishbia bought his controlling interest in 2023.
The Suns said in the letter, which ESPN obtained, that they have no obligation to buy out Seldin and Kohlberg.
The latest lawsuit from Seldin and Kohlberg marks the seventh against the Suns since November 2024. Others have been filed by current or former employees. Some of their allegations include discrimination, retaliation, harassment and wrongful termination.
