CTI Meeting Held at Long Last

No, that wasn’t a senior citizens club meeting at the Wyndham Hotel in North Little Rock on the morning of Saturday, Dec. 4. It was the long-awaited meeting of shareholders in Clean Technology International Corp., a Houston company that holds the patents on a machine that can apparently produce large quantities of carbon nanospheres.

The decidedly gray audience of more than 100 was a reminder that Darrell Lainhart of Sherwood had keep the tens of millions of dollars invested in CTIC stock by several hundred people from California to Florida tied up for years – more than a decade in most cases.

Investors, led by retired Marine Col. Charles D. “Danny” Cross of Pensacola, Fla., finally concluded that Lainhart and his wife, Irene, had been living an increasingly lavish lifestyle on money that was supposed to be used to bring CTIC’s technologies to market and to take the company public.

The Arkansas Securities Department succeeded in forcing the Lainharts to turn over real estate, personal property and more than 300 million shares of stock to CTIC, allowing investors to try to turn promising technology into a real business.

Cross was elected president and CEO of CTIC, and the board of directors includes two Little Rock investors: Tom Strickland, president of Systemedic Corp., and orthodontist David Wardlaw.

Lainhart-Free?

Although Darrell and Irene Lainhart agreed to disgorge all their shares of CTIC, the shareholders’ meeting did not turn out to be a Lainhart-free zone.

The couple’s son, Rick Lainhart, attended and sat quietly as Cross described his father as a thief, liar, screw-up and conman whose banter fooled men but rarely worked on women.

“Almost to the number, the women did not like him, did not like what he was saying. And almost to a number, the men did,” Cross said.

But the younger Lainhart, who said he personally owned 750,000 shares, repeatedly tried to object to votes taken at the meeting because, he said, some of the shareholders in attendance had never actually paid for their shares.

Cross dismissed Rick Lainhart’s objections, pointing out the 8.2 million shares he personally owned more than cancelled out the opposing votes of Lainhart’s shares.

Your Whispers staff tried to ask Rick Lainhart some questions – including whether he had personally paid for the shares he claimed – but his only response was, “No comment.”

Airbus

In reviewing the tangled history that brought the CTIC shareholders to the Wyndham on a sunny Saturday morning in December, Cross dropped this fascinating tidbit of information:

At one point, Airbus, the airline-manufacturing subsidiary of EADS Co. of Amsterdam, Netherlands, was interested in the carbon nanospheres CTIC’s machine can produce, possibly to improve the process of curing the resins used in aircraft wings.

CTIC shipped 485 grams of the carbon material to Europe for Airbus to study, Cross said, but nothing came of it.

“I don’t know the status of our relationship, but I would suspect that, like all the others, Darrell and [inventor Tony Wagner of Houston] screwed that up too,” Cross said.