Local man's deal sours

An international company joined up with a Walterboro businessman with plans to bring a new brand of water treatment to the United States, but a few years later, the partners are on the skids and stuck with two lawsuits, a bankruptcy filing and a soggy lump of clay.

Wade Craven, a 43-year-old "country boy" by his attorney's description, linked up with Britain-based Virotec while treating bacteria in hog ponds. Soon after, the company leased property from Craven and made him chief operating officer of its new Virotec AquaSolve joint venture.

Virotec, which also operated in Australia, Asia and Europe, held two-thirds interest in AquaSolve while Craven held the remaining stake. Last week, AquaSolve filed for bankruptcy amid allegations in a Colleton County lawsuit that Craven misappropriated an undetermined amount of Virotec's money.

Craven said the allegations "are still confusing."

"If you looked at some of their reports to shareholders before this happened, you would think I was the greatest thing that ever happened to Virotec," he said.

The lawsuit makes 44 allegations against Craven and his associates,

including inflating invoices, siphoning company money for personal use and selling AquaSolve's own products back to the company.

Virotec said in court filings that it sunk more than $3 million into AquaSolve.

Craven's attorney K.C. Campbell said the Walterboro man is nothing more than a "self-taught scientist" who moved from tending crops to killing weeds to treating water — but then went into business with the wrong people.

"I believe Mr. Craven's been kind of set up from the start as a scapegoat of this thing," Campbell said. "He's a minority member. The main people are Australian, and I think they're slick as whistles."

The lawsuit also alleges that Craven destroyed documents that would prove his wrongdoing. Campbell said he has documents that would exonerate his client.

"My fellow might not be the best business manager in the world, but I don't see any proof of what they're saying," Campbell said. "It's just hogwash to hide the problems in England and Australia."

Around the same time AquaSolve filed for bankruptcy, parent company Virotec International was taken over by another company, Hydrodec. Neither Virotec representatives nor their local attorney could be reached for comment this week.

Far from the London Stock Exchange, where Virotec's stock was traded, AquaSolve's patented water treatment technology is creating big problems for its first customer.

The Gilbert-Summit Rural Water District in the Midlands invested in the technology after the state Department of Health and Environmental Control told it to remove the radium that occurs naturally in its water supply.

Through the AquaSolve process, water passes through a filter that attracts radium. District manager Mark Forrester said the investment ran smoothly until the first six-month filter change.

AquaSolve did not properly store a used filter, which has not dried out and therefore can't be placed in a landfill because of environmental restrictions. The soggy clay-like filter remains secured at the district's facility, according to Forrester. One of the district's wells — now missing a filter — stays offline, and its customers have to abide by water restrictions, he said.

To make matters worse, the district fears it could end up paying $290,000 twice for the AquaSolve system: once to Virotec and once to a Connecticut company involved in the deal. According to a lawsuit, the district said it paid Virotec but that Virotec never paid the Connecticut firm, which then turned to Gilbert-Summit.

In his response to the lawsuit, Craven contends that he requested Virotec pay the Connecticut firm. Virotec suggested Craven was at fault and said AquaSolve is entitled to a judgment against him if that proves true, according to court documents.

Amid the legal potshots, Virotec still had equipment and proprietary chemical formulas stored on Craven's property. Under a March settlement, Craven and his associates agreed that they would not destroy any Virotec equipment or reveal trade secrets. They also agreed to allow access to the company mailbox and to let Virotec representatives remove 600 tons of product.

But two Colleton County sheriff's reports made after that agreement reveal hard feelings persisted against the overseas-based company.

On May 29, someone — identified by an AquaSolve employee as Craven — cut a lock on property the company leased and tried to remove a storage unit. The alleged intruder settled on a $10,000 piece of felt used in farming, which was later found on land belonging to Craven's father.

Days after, vandals used a forklift to wreak havoc at an AquaSolve work site — tipping a trailer, smashing two containers and driving the tines through the grill of a truck.

Craven said he removed the felt because it was his personal property but knew nothing about the forklift incident, except that the site was unsecured at the time.

"If they didn't want people to get into stuff, they shouldn't have left the gate up," he said.

Reach Allyson Bird at abird@postandcourier.com or 937-5594.