San Antonio developer sued for allegedly selling fake COVID disinfectant intended for Argentina

San Antonio-area real estate developer Lynd Company faces a lawsuit seeking more than $90 million for allegedly selling fake Covid-19 disinfectants intended for Argentina at the height of the pandemic in 2020.

The lawsuit by Miami-based AHBP claims BioSupplies, which it says is an affiliated company of Lynd’s, “doctored laboratory reports that grossly and fraudulently exaggerated” the product’s effectiveness, according to San Antonio Express-News. Lynd Co. president Adam Lynd said his company is merely a distributor of BioSupplies’ ViaClean products, which it also uses to clean its own apartments, and shouldn’t be named as a defendant.

“We have nothing to do with the production of ViaClean” products, Lynd said, according to the newspaper. “We couldn’t have committed fraud because we don’t create any of the materials. We don’t produce the product. We just literally hit ‘forward’ in an email and said, ‘Here you go.’”

AHBP, managed by real estate investor Alex Sapir, says the deception cost it $89.6 million in lost profits and $826,300 in expenses.

“As the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged the world in the summer of 2020, plaintiff agreed to market and distribute in Argentina disinfectant/cleaner that defendants manufactured and claimed would destroy, among other things, the virus that causes COVID-19,” the suit says.

When AHBP initially inquired about the products’ composition, manufacturing and quality controls and toxicology to obtain approval from Argentina, BioSupplies cited confidentiality concerns as the reason it couldn’t provide the information.

“In reality, defendants knew their product could not meet’’ the standards, the suit alleges.

In October 2020 AHBP agreed with BioSupplies to buy $100,000 of products within 45 days and spend $350,000 promoting it in Argentina.

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“At the onset of the global Covid-19 pandemic, AHBP sought to provide a product manufactured by ViaClean to the Argentinian public, which Bio Supplies and its affiliate The Lynd Company represented would kill the virus that causes Covid-19,” Terrence A. Oved, an attorney for AHBP, said in an email to the Express News.

“As alleged in the complaint, not only were these representations false, the defendants doubled down on their duplicity by forwarding fabricated laboratory reports to AHBP and the Argentinian government falsely showing the product to be effective,” Oved said.

Lynd, the San Antonio developer, which manages 16,000 apartment units in 81 communities, according to its LinkedIn page, says it doesn’t own or operate Bio Supplies, a distributor of ViaClean products. ViaClean is described in the filing as a Philadelphia company that has manufactured the disinfectant.

David Lynd said he plans to file a motion to dismiss the complaint.

“We emphatically believe we belong nowhere in this lawsuit,” Lynd said. “All we were was a facilitator of information provided by ViaClean, and that’s it.”

[San Antonio Express News] – Maddy Sperling