In the windswept desert north of Interstate-10, in the shadow of Fantasy Springs Resort Casino, there is a 47-acre plot of undeveloped land where a Chinese real estate firm planned to build the first hotel in the City of Coachella.

They called it Hyde Resorts and Residences Coachella Valley, a name fit for a glossy brochure.

It was supposed to be finished a year ago.

Instead, the original name and design for the Hyde have been scrapped. The property where it might have stood is as bare as ever. And companies linked to the Beijing real estate agency that tried to build it, Global House Buyer, are defending lawsuits from employees and Chinese investors looking to salvage whatever they can from a hotel that never got built.

“We had a potentially thriving business going in there,” said Roy Hahn, a local event producer who once considered building a resort on the same site.

“(The Hyde) would have done nothing but benefit the East Valley, Coachella and Indio," Hahn said. "It’s disappointing.”

To decipher how a daring plan to build Coachella’s first hotel became ensnared in a web of international intrigue, The Desert Sun reviewed hundreds of pages of documents, including court papers, property records, contracts and emails from the City of Coachella regarding the project. A reporter also spoke with two dozen investors, lawyers, current employees and former business associates involved in the project.

Many of them pointed the finger at someone else for the Hyde's downfall, alleging they were merely victims in a scheme beyond their control. The Desert Sun is relying primarily on sworn declarations taken in court and claims that could be supported by documentation.

The Desert Sun reporting uncovered this much:

Representatives of Global House Buyer approached Coachella officials in 2015 with plans for a resort on Vista Del Norte north of Interstate-10. Coachella officials twice visited Beijing to talk about the city in front of Chinese investors. Developers reimbursed the city $11,700 for the cost of the first trip, but have not paid a $14,500 invoice for the second visit.

Fourteen investors, most of them Chinese nationals, have sued companies linked to Global House Buyer and its head, Ruixue “Serena” Shi. Investors say they put more than $2 million into the proposed resort. They were promised they would each receive annual rental income in excess of $50,000 beginning in 2017. Some say they got partial refunds. Others say they never saw a dime.

Former Global House Buyer employees have also sued Serena Shi, including two claiming they left the firm after they caught Shi using company funds on personal expenses. Global House Buyer has sued a former consultant in the United States, James Clark. Shi says took money from her companies and then convinced investors to demand refunds.

Hyde Resorts and Residences Coachella Valley attempted to raise money using a federal program called EB-5, which rewards foreign investors with a green card. The program is popular in Riverside County, but two EB-5 projects that failed to materialize in Indio have become the subject of litigation in recent years.

Shi’s companies have not finished buying the real estate they need to develop a resort. Coachella Valley Hotel, LLC, one of several entities that has Shi as its manager, purchased 20 of 47 acres for the hotel in September 2016. It cost $2.9 million.

Global House Buyer has parted ways with SBE, a Los Angeles-based hotel and nightclub owner that was a part of the company's initial pitch to investors. One company hired since then is suing Shi and her U.S. real estate companies.

Beyond these points, there is more in dispute.

Even the basic question of who exactly is the proposed hotel's developer is a matter of debate. Global House Buyer maintains it is the sales agent of the resort, not its developer. Investors and the City of Coachella signed contracts with one limited liability company, land was purchased by a second and lawsuits name a third, fourth and fifth.

All of those companies have one thing in common: Ruixue "Serena" Shi, the president of Global House Buyer, is listed as their manager in state business records. Through all the changes in the Coachella project, she has remained a constant.

So far, Shi and her companies have little to show for the legal tumult.

The property that might have been the Hyde bears no visible signs of construction from the road, except for banners hung on a chain link fence.

"Coachella Valley Resort & Spa," they read, with Chinese characters scrawled underneath.

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About two and a half years ago, Coachella Mayor Steven Hernandez got a phone call from Mark Weber, the city's head of economic development at the time.

Representatives from a Chinese real estate company were visiting City Hall, Weber said. Could Hernandez come down to speak with them?

It must have been summer. Hernandez remembers that he was sweating when he arrived at City Hall to find a camera crew led by a man named James Clark, who introduced himself as a representative of the Chinese company Global House Buyer. The firm was a real estate brokerage that specializes in selling property overseas to investors in China. It wanted to build a resort in Coachella.

Clark asked if he could record a video of Hernandez talking about the city, its international name recognition and young population. Before long, the camera crew was putting makeup on the mayor and staging a shot in his office.

Hernandez is eager to attract hotels to Coachella. He thinks hospitality could be a boon for the city, providing jobs closer to home for residents that today commute to other cities to work at hotels and resorts.

“If you’re a mayor in, say, Coachella or Desert Hot Springs, the big thing that people want in your community is to diversify the economy,” he said. “We deserve a piece of that $8 billion tourist economy in the Coachella Valley.”

Global House Buyer seemed like the real deal. Hernandez learned that the company was working with SBE, a Los Angeles hospitality firm that operates glitzy nightclubs under the brand name Hyde. A real estate broker confirmed to him that the group was in escrow to buy land in Coachella, too. Preliminary site plans shared with the city showed more than 350 guest rooms in the proposed resort, plus swimming pools, sports courts and event space scattered about the property.

In November 2015, Global House Buyer invited city officials to visit China.

Weber and David Garcia, who was Coachella City Manager, would be the city’s ambassadors. It was a short trip. The pair boarded a United Airlines flight to Beijing on a Thursday and were home before 1 p.m. on Monday.

Besides plane tickets, the two men's expense reports include accommodations at the Grand Hyatt in Beijing, visa applications and a set of Chinese-language business cards Garcia ordered for the occasion.

The travel costs weren't on Coachella's dime. Hyde Morgan Development, LLC, one of several entities that lists Serena Shi as its manager, reimbursed the city for $11,700 in May 2016. Joe Faust, president of SBE subsidiary Dakota Development, signed a check paying for the trip. The check identified Hyde at the same business address as SBE’s office in Los Angeles. Faust declined comment for this story.

In Beijing, Garcia and Weber told potential investors about their corner of the desert. In an email obtained by The Desert Sun through a public records request, Clark instructed the two men to tell the audience about how Coachella is a “young, vibrant, growing community” and to emphasize “demand for resorts” in the valley.

Global House Buyer also used the presentation to introduce Chinese investors to SBE. For the development in Coachella, SBE subsidiary Dakota Development would develop the resort and the finished product would run under SBE's Hyde brand name, according to a press release by SBE around the time of the visit.

The weekend of events generated a smattering of publicity in China for the Coachella project. One news website posted a photo of Serena Shi on its homepage, flanked by Weber and Garcia to her left. Another had a photo of the same group posing with their hands on a glowing, transparent orb.

The visit appears to have wooed Chinese investors. Weber relayed good news upon his return to Coachella: The first phase of the development’s residences sold out over the weekend he and Garcia spent in Beijing.

In April 2016, Hernandez signed an agreement with Hyde Morgan Development LLC, one of several LLCs listing Serena Shi as its manager. The agreement bears the signature of Jason Cruce, vice president of SBE affiliate Dakota Development, and a note from Clark authorizing Cruce to sign on the company's behalf. Cruce declined comment for this story.

The agreement stipulated that Hyde Morgan would reimburse the city for the expense of hiring a planning consultant, lawyer, city surveyor and traffic engineer to review the proposed project for a "condo-hotel." Hyde would pay a $16,000 deposit for city consultant costs and an additional $10,000 for legal costs within 20 days.

In August, Coachella sent Global House Buyer a reminder: to move forward, it would need to send that $16,000 deposit.

It was April 2016 when Rong Xie picked up a brochure about something called "the Palm Springs Hyde Hotel Project" at Global House Buyer's office in Shenzhen, China.

The brochure had colorful photos of the BNP Paribas Open and Eagle Falls Golf Course, which is located west of the resort site. It had a full-page image of Coachella Mayor Steven Hernandez seated behind a desk, hands folded neatly. (Hernandez says Global House Buyer did not ask permission to use the image.)

Xie would come to regret the day he flipped through the glossy guide.

Xie is one of fourteen investors who have sued Serena Shi and companies connected to her U.S. real estate projects. The plaintiffs say they invested a total of $2.1 million, according to a review of court documents by The Desert Sun.

Investors like Xie signed three contracts with Hyde Morgan Development.

The first document was a sales contract, in which investors agreed to buy furnished condominiums planned for the resort. The second was a lease-back deal, in which investors agreed to rent the condos back to the resort operator so the resort could lease the units to guests. And the third was a buy-back agreement, giving investors the option to buy Hyde Morgan’s right to lease the unit after at least six years had passed.

The deal appeared to be a win-win: a win for resort developers, who needed money to finance construction, and a win for investors, who would receive a monthly rent check from the resort and could stay in their own condos up to two weeks every year.

Xie's contract worked like this. Xie would pay a $172,000 deposit on a $430,000 condo upfront and then pay the rest when the condo was finished. With the lease-back deal, Xie would receive $51,600 in annual rent from Hyde Morgan Development. The contract said he would receive his first rent check in January 2017 – whether the resort was open by then or not.

Xie agreed. Within days of seeing advertisements for a fabulous resort coming to the California desert, he had agreed to buy Unit A308. Xie and his family members wired a total of $172,000 to Hyde Morgan Development, LLC, according to his sworn statement.

After that, there were signs of progress. In September, a company that lists Shi as its manager, Coachella Valley Hotel LLC, bought the first 20 acres it would need for the resort. Global House Buyer told investors like Xie that a deal to buy the remaining 27 acres it would need was in the works.

But Xie says that he never received the income he expected.

"When the defendants did not make the payments promised in the original agreements, I requested that all my funds be returned to me outright," Xie wrote in his sworn court statement, "which defendants have failed and refused, and continue to fail and refuse, to do."

There could be many more investors waiting for their rent checks to come. Of the 350 units included in early designs for the project, it is not clear how many were available for sale and how many have been sold.

There certainly appear to be plenty of people in China discussing Global House Buyer's involvement in Coachella. Some have taken to the smart phone app WeChat to swap information about the project and stay in touch with people in the United States – including James Clark, the city's initial point of contact with Global House Buyer.

While investors like Xie struggled to get their deposits back in China, progress on the real estate development had stalled. And exacerbating the delays, conflict was brewing between Serena Shi and a handful of the people that worked for her companies in the United States.

This year, at least two people identifying themselves as former employees have sued Shi and her company's U.S. affiliates in Los Angeles County. The first is Darcy Brody, who worked for a Global House Buyer affiliate. In that lawsuit, she claims the company owes her $10,000, the maximum claim for an individual in small claims court.*

The second is James T. Watson, who says he was hired to be a senior financial associate. He claims he was abruptly fired after he confronted Shi for withdrawing “millions of dollars” from company funds for personal expenses like “clothing, jewelry, a pregnancy surrogacy agency and a personal stylist.”

James Clark, the man who introduced Coachella to Global House Buyer, is also feuding with Shi. In a sworn statement filed with one investor lawsuit, Clark accuses Shi of using investor money “for her own vulgar and wanton pleasures."

"I believe Ms. Shi is not an honest person, and when I discovered that, I ceased all contact with her," Clark wrote in the statement.

Shi has a different explanation for what happened to investors' money. She blames Clark for months of delay and for sowing panic among investors.

In her own statement made under penalty of perjury, Shi claims that Clark:

Solicited investors "outside of authorized channels" by drawing up fake versions of company operating agreements;

Developed a scheme "to embezzle $300,000 in fees";

Started investor chat groups on WeChat, telling the groups that Shi's companies "were insolvent, unreliable and no longer capable of developing the project";

Caused "numerous demands for refunds," forcing her to delay purchasing the second, 27-acre parcel.

Global House Buyer also sued Clark over an unrelated real estate deal. In that lawsuit, the company won $313,750 in a default judgment, because Clark did not file necessary paperwork in court.

By December 2016, Global House Buyer and James Clark had split. The company told Coachella it planned to change the resort's design, reducing the number of hotel rooms. And it informed the city that Global House Buyer had stopped working with SBE, which would force the hotel to drop the Hyde name.

Investors expected their first rent checks to arrive in a month's time, but Global House Buyer had not purchased the 27 acres it needed to start construction, never mind open a hotel. The company had not submitted final design plans to the city for review. It had no permits to build.

It did not matter. In January, Coachella officials were Beijing bound again.

This time, the emissaries were Bill Pattison, who had replaced David Garcia as city manager, and Luis Lopez, the city’s director of development services.

Again, it was a short trip. The main event was a presentation at a hotel, where Pattison and Lopez stood on a big stage in front of a couple hundred people. Pattison thought their audience was current investors, potential investors or both.

“We went over there to tell them that we were building a new library, that our audits were impeccable,” Pattison said. “There was nothing about, we’re endorsing (Global House Buyer). It was about us telling the city’s story.”

The talk lasted 20 minutes, Pattison said.

The time didn't come cheap. The city sent a $14,500 bill to GHB Development, LLC, another entity that has Serena Shi listed as its manager, in March 2017.

The payment was due by the end of that month. But Coachella confirmed to The Desert Sun that it has not been reimbursed for the trip.

Whether Coachella receives the money or not, seeking reimbursement for travel to Beijing is consistent with the standards of California's Fair Political Practices Commission, Pattison said in a statement.

"FPPC allows agencies to receive payment for official agency purposes. In this case, city staff traveled for official economic development purposes," he said.

In an interview, Mayor Hernandez said that it is up to city staff that visited Beijing to maintain their neutrality should Global House Buyer submit a development proposal. Although Pattison and Lopez do not vote on the city's Planning Commission, Lopez pens staff reports that recommend whether to approve permits for real estate projects.

“They’re professional enough to disagree with the developer, you know what I mean?" Hernandez said. "We trust their professionalism in their decision to go. Because Global House Buyer asked them to go doesn't mean we’re in favor of the project."

Global House Buyer has not yet submitted a development plan to Coachella. But the city is on its way to getting its first hotel anyway.

Developers broke ground on the first stage of a hotel next to Rancho Las Flores Park in mid-2017. It is set to open next year, in time for Coachella and Stagecoach.

“Coachella gets to be part of the tourism industry now, and going from zero rooms to (about) 700 in a year is something,” Hernandez said when the project was under consideration in May 2017. “It’s really going to transform that area there.”

Coachella is not the only California municipality where Chinese investors are sending their money.

Chinese investment into overseas property and real estate development reached record levels in 2016, spurred by Chinese buyers that see property in, say, Southern California as a good value compared to expensive cities like Hong Kong.

California brings in more Chinese investment than any other state in the country. It attracted $28 billion from China between the year 2000 and the third quarter of 2017, according to the research firm Rhodium Group.

Riverside County is seeing a chunk of that money. In particular, the county is a hot spot for a program of the U.S. Customs and Immigration Services called the Immigrant Investor Program, or EB-5.

Here’s how EB-5 works: In exchange for putting $1 million into a project that will generate 10 permanent jobs, a foreign investor can get a green card. Under certain circumstances, the program is open to investors that put in as little as $500,000.

Riverside County has become a poster child for EB-5 visas, a program that is especially popular with Chinese immigrants. In 2013, Riverside County’s congressional leaders boasted that the county accounted for a fifth of the nation's EB-5 centers, the name for companies that connect investors to projects that need funding.

Background:EB-5 visa program brings foreign investment to the valley

Investors that have sued Shi and her companies do not claim to be EB-5 applicants, but The Desert Sun found evidence that the project has attempted to participate in the program.

In 2016 and again in 2017, a consultant contacted Riverside County officials on behalf of a project called Hyde Coachella Resort & Residences. The consultant was seeking a letter confirming that the property in Coachella is a “targeted employment area,” a place that is considered rural or that has high unemployment. Both conditions lower the threshold for EB-5 investors, requiring them to only invest $500,000 in order to qualify for the program, rather than the usual $1 million.

The county wrote two letters verifying that the Hyde property qualified for the lower bar.

Other Coachella Valley projects funded with EB-5 investment have become mired in litigation.

First, in 2016, a group of sixteen investors from Taiwan and China sued the owners of the Indio Fashion Mall, claiming that they gave $500,000 each to revamp the shopping center, with the understanding that they would get green cards in exchange. Renovations were never completed. Investors say their visas were denied.

Second, in November 2017, the owner of 6.4 acres of vacant land in Indio pleaded guilty to money laundering and fraud charges in connection with an EB-5 scheme that collected more than $50 million from primarily Chinese investors.

More:Indio Fashion Mall 'lies fallow' while owners battle with investors

More:Owner of Indio property, pegged for 120-room hotel, pleads guilty in $50M visa fraud case

In December 2017, Coachella officials Luis Lopez and Bill Pattison received an email from a woman who identified herself as Joanne, an investor they had met in China a year before.

“Dear Sir,” it began:

"I am an investor of the project of Coachella Valley Hotel in United States. My name is Joanne. It was a great pleasure for me as having met you at the Coachella Valley Resort & SPA project description meeting, which was organized by Global House Buyer (GHB Beijing) in the first month of this year. I am quite concerned with the latest progress in the project which I am involved in. Now the project has shown no sign of construction or progress, so I am writing to you to know about the updating information about this project and the reasons why the construction has not started yet. Moreover, I wonder if there are some difficulties the project may have met. In fact, I have devoted all my savings into this project. Therefore I am rather anxious about the situation of this project as it seems that it didn’t go smoothly, right?"

Joanne attached a letter Global House Buyer sent to investors like her, detailing updates on its project. The letter said that the company planned to finish buying property in Coachella in December 2017, would break ground in April 2018 and would open in December 2019.

“Dear Sir, could you inform me that whether the situation I explained above is real?” Joanne wrote.

The real situation is this: Global House Buyer has not bought a second property on Vista Del Norte, although the company's attorney says it is still negotiating to buy the land. Investors are still suing Serena Shi. Former employees are still suing Serena Shi. And the fallout from all of the litigation has left Coachella waiting for an oasis in the sun-parched desert, wondering if it was a mirage all along.

Roy Hahn went to see the 47 acres for himself this fall. Hahn had staked his dreams on this piece of land himself once, too. He thought it would be the perfect spot to build Return to Atzlan, a theme park with a 200-foot pyramid, a concert plaza big enough to fit 10,000 people, rides, restaurants and a hotel.

But Hahn’s plan evaporated when the landowners received a higher offer from a new buyer, he says. It was Global House Buyer, which ultimately purchased the 20 acres Hahn had been eyeing.

Hahn visited the site in October, walking an unpaved path along the east side, through the 27 acres Global House Buyer still hasn’t purchased, over to the 20 acres it already owns.

He took short videos of the scene as he walked. In one corner, he found what looked to be the remnants of a small house that had burned to the ground. Its only remains were twisted scraps of metal, piles of black ash and a rusty doorknob lying in the dirt where the front door might have stood.

Hahn had his doubts about the Hyde project from the start, wondering if Coachella could support such a large hotel. Now, he worries that controversy and lawsuits will keep the land as it is: a dusty, empty lot.

“Today there could be 1,000 jobs out there if our plan would have gone or if Serena’s plan would have gone,” he said. “It would have increased the value of all the property around it by bringing revenue into the area.”

“Now there’s not going to be any jobs. The land values will probably go the opposite direction because of that. And then there’s the great loss of revenue to the City of Coachella.”

Editor's note: A previous version of this story contained incorrect information about a relevant date in a former employee’s lawsuit.

Reach business and real estate reporter Amy DiPierro at amy.dipierro@desertsun.com or 760-218-2359.