Nanomaterials No Small Matter for Lainhart Investors
By Arkansas Business Staff
3/16
Darrell Lainhart was a name that rang a distant bell with old hands on the "Whispers" staff, but it seems to be on the tip of many tongues.
Lainhart is president and CEO of a Sherwood company called Clean Technology International Corp. CTIC, according to its Web site, is "a privately held carbon nanomaterials company founded in 1993. After years of extensive research and development in the nanoparticles field, CTIC can produce large quantities of pure, highly conductive carbon nanomaterials. CTIC will expand production facilities as demand requires."
1993 was three years after Lainhart came to the attention of Arkansas Business for a couple of foreclosures that added up to about $2 million. That was about the same time his Delta Financial Investment Corp. Closed up shop.
We really hadn't heard anything about him since.
But it seems that, starting about 10 years ago, he and CTIC were able to round up quite a few investors with quite a lot of money. If you consider $50 million a lot of money, that is.
And some of those investors some local, many from other states are clearly not happy. One of them has set up a Web site for fellow investors called CleanTechNanoShareholders.com, but Lainhart is also a, ahem, popular topic of conversation in an online discussion group called PhysForum.com.
Some of the investors say they have lodged complaints with the Arkansas Securities Department, but you know regulators won't confirm or deny those things unless some action is taken.
We've left repeated messages at Lainhart's home and called other numbers that investors said he had used in the past, but we haven't heard back from him.
Is he the Arkansas version of Bernard Madoff?
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