By Matt Fair

Law360 (June 18, 2020, 6:18 PM EDT) -- A Philadelphia-based law firm has lobbed a lawsuit at Santander NA, alleging the bank's botched handling of Paycheck Protection Program loan applications cost it tens of thousands of dollars in potential funding as the coronavirus outbreak put a damper on business.

Sidkoff Pincus & Green PC says in a complaint filed in state court that it was forced to turn to a secondary lender after Santander dragged its feet for two weeks on providing an application form to request more than a quarter million dollars in PPP funds under the CARES Act passed by Congress in March to help keep the U.S. economy afloat as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold.

"Although there was a critical urgency to submitting the PPP application as soon as possible since the program had a limited amount of money available for lending and it was anticipated that applications would far exceed the amount available for lending in the PPP program, defendant had no application available," the firm said in its June 12 complaint.

According to the complaint, Sidkoff Pincus reached out to Santander immediately after passage of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act at the end of March to express its interest in applying for some $285,000 worth of PPP loan funding.

Despite other banks and lenders beginning to accept loan applications as of April 3, however, the complaint says that Santander provided no clear indication of when an application would be made available to its customers.

After receiving an email from Santander on April 10 saying that an application was finally available, the complaint says firm officials immediately tried to log in to Sidkoff Pincus' online account only to find no application was available.

Hours on the phone with Santander customer service representatives and other bank officials failed to resolve the issue, the complaint says.

On April 13, the complaint says that a local Santander representative finally emailed the firm a PPP application to complete offline and submit to the bank.

Even then, however, the complaint says the application wasn't forwarded to the U.S. Small Business Administration for review until after the window for submissions was already closed.

In the meantime, however, the firm says it turned to Citizens Bank NA, where it opened an account to be able to submit an alternative PPP loan application.

"Based on plaintiff's fears that the PPP funds would be running out and plaintiff would be shut out from receiving its loan and defendant's inability to even make a loan application available, plaintiff had no alternative but to try and locate another bank that was accepting PPP loan applications," Sidkoff Pincus said.

But Citizens said Sidkoff Pincus would only be able to qualify for $245,000 worth of PPP funding, or about $40,000 less than it had expected to receive through Santander.

The firm's complaint levels claims of negligence and fraudulent misrepresentation against Santander and seeks damages for the $40,000 it says it missed out on as a result of the bank's faulty application process.

A Santander spokesperson declined to comment on the lawsuit when contacted Thursday, while an attorney with Sidkoff Pincus did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

Sidkoff Pincus & Green is represented in-house by Gary Green and Larry Keller.

Santander is represented by Mark Fidanza of Reed Smith LLP and Steven Adams of Stevens & Lee.

The case is Sidkoff Pincus & Green PC v. Santander Bank NA, case number 200401293, before the Court of Common Pleas of Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania.

--Editing by Orlando Lorenzo.

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