Deal Gone Bad Forces Florida Urgent Care Center to Liquidate

An urgent care center in Florida is being forced to shut down, not because it couldn’t draw enough patients or provided bad care, but because of a highly charged disagreement over the nature of its start-up funds. Here’s what everyone agrees on: A Florida woman provided substantial funds to help a new urgent care center get going 2 years ago. After that, it gets harder to separate fact from fiction in the case of a business deal gone sour. The urgent care center owner claims the funds were a gift from a wealthy benefactor, and the woman who provided the funds says the money was a loan for which she’s owed hundreds of thousands of dollars. Ultimately, a jury decided the urgent care owner had to pay the money back; the resulting $287,000 judgment is simply more than the urgent care center in Lake Nona, FL can pony up, so it’s liquidating its assets—and, since the bankruptcy halts other legal actions, the woman who won the judgment isn’t going to see a penny for the time being. Regardless, the urgent care center’s doors are locked and the victorious plaintiff claims it’s all part of a shell game intended to hide proceeds from the liquidation. The fact that the details are so murky demonstrates the necessity to keep all business dealings above board, well documented, and blessed by legal and financial counsel.