Texas A&M Investors Sue Former Partners, Lawyers
A group of Nevada investors who backed the $65 million acquisition of land for the Texas A&M University campus in San Antonio is suing the project’s former managing partners and its lawyers for allegedly putting their own interests ahead of the investors’.
The suit, filed last week in Clark County, Nev., accuses the project’s former managing partners, Ralph Lampman and Tom and Robert Lozzi, the law firm of Fulbright & Jaworwki and the firm’s San Antonio partner Jane Macon of taking actions that hurt the investors, Verano Land Group, financially, the San Antonio Express-News reports.
Those actions include donating 694 acres of the 2,500-acre parcel, valued at $25 million, to A&M, even though Verano’s investors understood the donation would be limited to no more than 400 acres, the suit alleges. Macon and her firm “derived substantial personal benefits” from the donation of the extra land, it says.
The former managing partners also are accused of creating another company, VLTM Texas, to become the project’s developer without the investors’ knowledge or consent, according to the suit.
Neither Lampman nor Tom Lozzi responded to the Express-News’ request for comment.
George Scofield, the partner in charge of Fulbright & Jaworski’s San Antonio office, called the allegations against Macon and the firm “frivolous, baseless and completely unfounded.”
“What’s ironic is that it is precisely because of Ms. Macon’s outstanding efforts that the project has been met with such success,” Scofield told the newspaper.
A spokesman for A&M, which is not named in the suit, declined comment.
