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Loopa Finance Backs Nearly 300 Chilean Families in $18 Million Villa Panamericana Construction Defects Suit

By John Freund |
May 26, 2026

Loopa Finance Backs Nearly 300 Chilean Families in $18 Million Villa Panamericana Construction Defects Suit

Latin America–focused litigation funder Loopa Finance has announced that it will fund a civil action filed by nearly 300 apartment owners at the Villa Panamericana housing complex in Cerrillos, Santiago, against the developers and contractors behind the project. The claim, brought before Santiago’s 10th Civil Court, exceeds $18 million in aggregate damages.

According to a Loopa Finance announcement, the suit is led by Nicolás Vassallo, partner at Chilean firm Abogabir Miranda, and targets Inmobiliaria Parque Cerrillos SpA, Empresa Constructora DLP S.A., Ameris Capital S.A., and related investment entities. Plaintiffs are seeking roughly $11 million in direct damages and temporary housing costs, nearly $7 million in moral damages, and additional compensation equal to 10% of each unit’s purchase price to capture lost property value.

Villa Panamericana’s Lot B comprises 17 buildings and 1,355 apartments originally built to house athletes at the 2023 Pan American and Parapan American Games, before being allocated to lower-income families through government housing subsidies and the Teletón program. Residents have reported water leaks, structural cracks, and serious electrical, plumbing, gas, and elevator failures, with preliminary expert reports citing violations of Chile’s General Urban Planning and Construction Law.

“Access to justice should not depend on the affected families’ financial resources,” said Federico Muradas, Loopa’s head of legal. Loopa’s funding will cover legal and technical costs of the proceedings on a non-recourse basis, in what stands as one of the larger consumer-tied construction defect actions yet financed in Latin America.

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John Freund

John Freund

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Commercial

Certum Group Survey: 70% of In-House Counsel Know Litigation Funding, Only 6% Have Used It

A new research brief from litigation finance and insurance provider Certum Group finds that corporate legal departments are broadly aware of litigation risk transfer products but almost never use them, a gap the firm describes as "the next frontier in corporate litigation strategy."

According to the brief published by Certum Group, which surveyed 44 General Counsel and in-house litigation attorneys, roughly 70% of respondents are familiar with litigation funding but have never used it, while only about 6% have. The brief was authored by Kevin Skrzysowski, a Director at Certum Group, whose litigation funding team also includes Director William Marra, a former U.S. Supreme Court clerk.

The survey characterises in-house litigation risk as operational rather than existential. Employment and intellectual property disputes drew the highest concern levels, while roughly two-thirds of respondents reported no concern at all about antitrust or mass tort exposure. Decision-making was consistent across defensive and affirmative matters, with likelihood of success (~84%) and cost to pursue (~74%) the most frequently cited factors.

On affirmative claims, respondents said they would be more likely to proceed if cost and risk could be shifted to an insurer (~62%), a contingent-fee firm (~49%) or through claim monetisation (~46%). A litigation funder ranked lowest at ~28%. Looking forward, however, roughly 51% said they would consider litigation funding, ahead of capital protection insurance (~43%) and claim monetisation (~41%), with about 30% ruling out all such products.

Cost certainty (~51%) and budget constraints (~46%) were the leading drivers of interest. Among the small group that has used litigation funding, two-thirds reported satisfaction with the decision.

Commercial

UPC Orders €200,000 Security After Finding Patent Claimant Had Pledged Its Assets to a Funder

The Unified Patent Court has ordered a newly formed patent claimant to post €200,000 in security for costs after concluding that the entity was economically assetless because its patents, licences and future income had all been pledged to its litigation funder.

As reported by Mishcon de Reya, the Hamburg Local Division reached that finding in *Nixu v Infoblox* (UPC_CFI_360/2026). Nixu, a US-domiciled claimant, was incorporated in March 2025 and acquired the patent in suit weeks later. The court declined to treat US domicile as a ground for security in itself, holding that "a claimant's domicile in the US did not, in itself, justify security for costs" and noting that US courts recognise European judgments.

What did justify security was the claimant's financial structure. Under a Patent Security Agreement, all patents, licences and future income were pledged to the funder, and part of the purchase price remained unpaid. The court found Nixu was "basically assetless in an economical sense" and dependent on discretionary support from its funder.

The same update reports a second security decision. In *La Siddhi v Athena Pharmaceutiques* (UPC_CoA_48/2026), the Court of Appeal upheld a €75,000 order against an SME claimant, confirming that "a party's SME status does not, by itself, exempt that party from the obligation to provide security for costs." The court distinguished fee reductions and cost ceilings available to SMEs from the security regime under Article 69(4) UPCA and Rule 158, which contains no SME carve-out. Security was set at roughly 60% of the applicable €112,000 recoverable costs ceiling.

Together the decisions suggest the UPC will look through corporate form to the funding arrangement itself when assessing whether a claimant can meet an adverse costs award.

Commercial

Demotech Urges Insurers to Break Out Litigated Claims, Citing Funded Claim Generation

Insurance rating agency Demotech has called for a structural change to the way property and casualty insurers report loss costs, arguing that the current composite format masks the effect of technology-driven claim generation that is sometimes financed by third-party litigation funders.

As reported by PR Newswire, Joseph L. Petrelli, president and co-founder of Demotech, said the firm's 2022 review of failed carriers pointed to litigation as the decisive factor. "In 2022, our postmortem of failed carriers identified new, annual litigation as the proximate cause of what destroyed them," Petrelli said.

The argument turns on an assumption built into loss cost reporting decades ago. Petrelli noted that until the mid-1980s advisory organisations published rates and premiums for insurers to adopt or deviate from, and that "an implicit assumption underlying the original loss cost format was that an equilibrium existed in the relative claim frequency between claims reported and settled with policyholders, and claims litigated and negotiated with plaintiff firms."

Demotech's position is that the equilibrium no longer holds. Its research concluded that industrial-scale increases in litigated claims were achieved through technology, online marketing and advertising, "sometimes financed through third-party litigation funding." Petrelli also pointed to alternative business structures, managed services organisations and what he described as other mutations in the legal profession that "may circumvent the disclosure of third-party litigation funding."

The proposed remedy is to trifurcate loss cost data, disaggregating a single composite figure into claims closed without payment, litigated claims and non-litigated claims, each weighted by its own frequency. Demotech contends that the added granularity would allow insurers and regulators to price the litigated portion of a book directly rather than absorbing it into a blended average.