Specialty Chemical Companies Spar Over Trade Secrets, Conspiracy Allegations

Two longtime chemical industry collaborators are now locked in a bitter legal dispute over allegations that they attempted to sabotage each other’s business.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch last week detailed the spat between US Polymers-Accurez and Kane International. US Polymers-Accurez, based in St. Louis, produces resins for coatings and inks and long supplied Rye, N.Y.-based Kane, which makes materials for the printing ink, nail polish and specialty coating industries.

Although the companies reportedly did business together for nearly 20 years, they traded lawsuits in Missouri federal court in recent months.

In June, Kane alleged in its filing that US Polymers-Accurez violated their 2009 supply agreement by halting its shipments and contacting Kane's customers in hopes of securing additional business -- and misleading those customers with the use of Kane product names and formulas.

That case reportedly went to arbitration early this month.

Two days later, US Polymers-Accurez alleged in a separate lawsuit that Kane, its executives and an affiliate company engaged in a "vast conspiracy of bribery, theft and misappropriation" over several years.

The company, in part, suggested that Kane allocated more than $200,000 in secret payments to former US Polymers employees to misrepresent themselves to customers. The filing also alleged that Kane took steps to conceal its capabilities in the ink resin market and eliminate US Polymers from the supply chain.

US Polymers-Accurez reportedly sought $30 million in damages.

“But for the Kane conspiracy, and the charade that Kane created to envelop its failed but desperate attempts to stay current in the sales of ink resin and shellac chemical formulas, US Polymers-Accurez would not have suffered immeasurable injury to its goodwill, enterprise value and customer relations,” US Polymers attorneys wrote in the lawsuit.