Solyndra declares bankruptcy

jillio said:
Which quote in there exactly do you disagree with and why? I still don't see anything about Obama promising they would create jobs and not go bankrupt.:dunno2:
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:lol: ooooookay
 
I guess some people just don't understand the difference between making a statement about something that is possible, and making a guarantee that something will happen.:dunno2:
 
jillio said:
I guess some people just don't understand the difference between making a statement about something that is possible, and making a guarantee that something will happen.:dunno2:
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$535 million taxpayer dollars down the drain on possible *shrug* he should have played mega millions with it that is possible too :laugh2:
 
As compared to how much spent on unnecessary wars and looking for WMD's that don't exist?
 
jillio said:
Which quote in there exactly do you disagree with and why? I still don't see anything about Obama promising they would create jobs and not go bankrupt.:dunno2:
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and?


Just thought I would contribute to this thread with one word questions.
 
I get Hope and Change now......throw billions at hopes.....be left with change. I'm putting that on t-shirts tomorrow. :). I hope they sell. Oops there I go....it's catching.

Oh well I am sure obama subscribes to Oprah's mag so there's always Publisher's Clearing House. Mr. Obama, you may already be a winner.
 
From a friend

Side effects may include bankruptcy, corruption, investor fraud, and re-electal dysfunction. Ask your doctor if Solyndra is right for you.
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:lol:
 
Republicans allege that the White House, in a series of emails, attempted to pressure officials tasked with making a final decision on the company’s financing, so that Vice President Joe Biden could announce its approval at a 2009 groundbreaking for a new company factory. Committee Democrats, in alliance with the White House, sought to drag the Bush administration into the mix because it began the process of considering loan guarantees to the company in 2006. Yet no loan was ever finalized until Barack Obama became president and the first stimulus package was passed.
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Second, emails released exclusively to the Washington Post​ demonstrate that the Obama administration was, in fact, attempting to rush the federal loan reviewers. The paper notes that White House officials repeatedly asked Office of Management and Budget (OMB) officials when a decision could be made, while reminding them about the upcoming press event. OMB officials reportedly expressed concern that they weren’t being given enough time to make an adequate assessment as to whether the $535 million loan was an acceptable risk.
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Solyndra Investigation Heats Up | FrontPage Magazine


There have been several reports that people were pressured to lie in regards to these loans.

Cronyism.


Obama administration 'pressured Air Force general to change testimony' - Telegraph
 
Solyndra employees: Company suffered from mismanagement, heavy spending
By Carol D. Leonnig and Joe Stephens, Updated: Wednesday, September 21, 6:35 PM
Former employees of Solyndra, the shuttered solar company that exhausted half a billion dollars of taxpayer money, said they saw questionable spending by management almost as soon as a federal agency approved a $535 million government-backed loan for the startup.

A new factory built with public money boasted a gleaming conference room with glass walls that, with the flip of a switch, turned smoky-gray to conceal the room’s occupants. Hastily purchased state-of-the-art equipment ended up being sold for pennies on the dollar, still in its plastic bubble wrap, employees said.

As the $344 million factory went up just down the road from the company’s leased plant in Fremont, Calif., workers watched as pallets of unsold solar panels stacked up in storage. Many wondered: Did we even need this new factory?

“After we got the loan guarantee, they were just spending money left and right,” said former Solyndra engineer Lindsey Eastburn. “Because we were doing well, nobody cared. Because of that infusion of money, it made people sloppy.”

Solyndra’s ability to secure federal backing also made the company eager for more assistance, interviews and records show. Company executives ramped up their Washington lobbying efforts, hiring a former Senate aide to work with the White House and the Energy Department. Within a week of getting a loan guarantee commitment from the Energy Department, Solyndra applied for another guarantee worth $400 million. It never won final approval.

On Friday, company executives are scheduled to appear at a House committee investigating how Solyndra obtained its loan and whether the Obama White House rushed its approval for political reasons. Chief executive Brian Harrison and chief financial officer Bill Stover were supposed to face a grilling about the company’s spending and collapse, but they announced Tuesday they would assert their Fifth Amendment rights because of a criminal probe of the company by the Justice Department.

A key question for lawmakers is whether Solyndra executives misled Congress about the financial state of the company as late as July, when questions about the loan surfaced on Capitol Hill. Solyndra filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Aug. 31, laying off 1,100 workers and leaving taxpayers on the hook for repayment of the guaranteed loan made through the Federal Financing Bank.

Solyndra was once touted by President Obama as the flagship of his administration’s effort to spur the clean-energy industry. The Post reported earlier this month that e-mails showed that White House officials pushed federal reviewers for a final decision on the Solyndra loan guarantee as they sought to schedule a press announcement with the company and Vice President Biden.

An Energy Department spokesman said the agency was unaware that Solyndra sales projections, part of the justification for the new factory, had been overly rosy. Spokesman Damien LaVera declined to comment on the employees’ accounts of company spending.

Founded by enterpreneur Chris Gronet in 2004, Solyndra pushed the Obama administration to support its niche solar technology — efficient cylindrical solar panels that were relatively expensive to make but cheaper and easier to install on the roofs of “big box” stores and other commercial buildings. The new administration awarded the company its first loan guarantee under the stimulus program.

The leading investors in Solyndra were two investment funds with ties to George B. Kaiser, a major campaign fundraising “bundler” for Obama.

The White House had scheduled a press event around the time of Solyndra’s factory groundbreaking on Sept. 4, 2009. Federal reviewers gave their final nod to the deal on Sept. 2.

With the loan guarantee in hand, Solyndra built a second, seven-acre factory with 19 loading docks. As part of the expansion, Gronet and fellow managers hoped to cut costs by speeding up the automated assembly. To do so, they bought a custom-made assembly tool from VDL, a Dutch company. The company had never built that kind of equipment, but it promised the assembly tool would arrive in the summer of 2010.

By that time, Gronet had been pushed out as chief executive. Workers told The Post in interviews that they were shocked that summer when Harrison, newly installed as CEO, told them that sales projections used to justify the new factory to federal agencies had been far too optimistic.

“Obviously their forecasts weren’t correct,” said Peter M. Kohlstadt, a research engineer. “We just didn’t have the sales we thought we had.”

Employees said that in 2010 they noticed that solar panel inventories were growing — raising questions about why they weren’t being sold. Another major problem arose when the new assembly equipment arrived laste and had technical problems. VDL officials did not respond to a request for comment.


Although Harrison stressed in a Post interview earlier this year that he focused on business, not “the political aspect of what happens in Washington,” public records show that since 2008, Solyndra has spent more than $1 million on lobbying inside the Beltway.

Lobbying expenditures of $160,000 a year in 2008 and 2009 accelerated as Solyndra’s financial and political troubles mounted. By 2010, such spending had grown to $550,000. So far this year, Solyndra has reported spending $220,000, but that number will grow as more reports filter in.

In a July 13 letter to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, then probing his company’s loan, Harrison insisted that the company’s future was bright.

“Solyndra’s revenues grew from $6 million in 2008 to $100 million in 2009 to $140 million in 2010,” Harrison wrote. “For 2011, revenues are projected to nearly double again.”

Bankruptcy filings show the company was at the time desperately looking for bridge financing to keep its doors open. It shut down six weeks later.

Sakera Alima, who began working at Solyndra as a financial analyst in the fall of 2010, said she was warned by a mentor that the company wasn’t doing well financially.

“She said, ‘I’ve been working here the past three years and I feel like any day now I might not have my job,’ ” Alima recalled. “I knew it was a risk.”

Kohlstadt said employees arrived at work to find the company closed, and they lost vacation pay and benefits without notice.

Kohlstadt said Solyndra’s collapse leaves him doubly affected.

“I’m being hit twice: As a taxpayer, $500 million, where did it go?” he said. “I’m hit a second time: I’m not getting money that is owed to me and the government hasn’t done anything to look out for us.”
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Solyndra employees: Company suffered from mismanagement, heavy spending - The Washington Post
 
Solyndra execs to plead 5th at House hearing
By Matthew Daly
Associated Press / September 20, 2011
E-mail this article To: Invalid E-mail address Add a personal message:(80 character limit) Your E-mail: Invalid E-mail address
Sending your articleYour article has been sent. E-mail| Print| Comments ()Text size – + WASHINGTON—Two top executives at a bankrupt California solar energy company say they will invoke their Fifth Amendment rights and refuse to answer questions when they appear at a House hearing on Friday.

Solyndra Inc. Chief Executive Officer Brian Harrison and Chief Financial Officer W.G. Stover sent letters to the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Tuesday informing them of their plans to remain silent. The Associated Press obtained copies of the letters, which cite an ongoing criminal investigation by the FBI.

Harrison and Stover said they still plan to appear before the committee, which is investigating a $528 million loan Solyndra received from the Energy Department in 2009.

Republican leaders of the House energy panel said they were dismayed that Harrison and Stover had reneged on earlier promises to testify.

"It's disappointing that the officials who canvassed the halls of Congress in mid-July and misled our members about the financial state of their company are now unwilling to answer direct questions, but any effort to cover up the truth will ultimately not succeed," Reps. Fred Upton and Cliff Stearns said in a statement.

Upton, of Michigan, chairs the Energy and Commerce Committee, while Stearns, of Florida, heads a subcommittee on oversight and investigations

Upton and Stearns said they will not allow "stonewalling" by DOE, the White House Office of Management and Budget, Solyndra or anyone else to stop their investigation into what happened to half a billion dollars of taxpayers' money.

Solyndra filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection earlier this month and laid off its 1,100 employees. The Silicon Valley company was the first renewable-energy company to receive a loan guarantee under a stimulus-law program to encourage green energy and was frequently touted by the Obama administration as a model.

The company's implosion and revelations that the administration hurried Office of Management and Budget officials to finish their review of the loan in time for a September 2009 groundbreaking have become an embarrassment for President Barack Obama.

Meanwhile, Upton, Stearns and another energy committee leader said they will step up scrutiny of 14 loan guarantees given preliminary approval by the Energy Department but not yet completed. If approved, the loans total more than $8 billion.

The Energy Department faces a Sept. 30 deadline to complete the loans, and lawmakers said they were concerned that "another rush to meet stimulus deadlines" will result in some loans being completed before they are ready.

"We question whether the DOE needs additional time to conduct its due diligence to ensure that taxpayer dollars are not being put at risk unnecessarily," Upton, Stearns and Rep. Ed Whitfield said in a letter to Energy Secretary Steven Chu. Whitfield, of Kentucky, leads the energy and power subcommittee.

Rep. Darrell Issa, D-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said his committee also is investigating Solyndra and the broader loan program, which Issa said was "picking winners and losers" in what he called a misguided attempt to manage the economy.

"We're looking at the system, the corruption that seems to be endemic in both ideologically picking winners, but also looking at the possibility that this is an unfixable program," Issa said Tuesday in an interview with C-SPAN.

Democrats have hit back at Republicans in recent days, accusing them of hypocrisy on the loan issue.

Stearns backed a battery manufacturing plant in Jacksonville that received a $95.5 million grant from the Energy Department through the stimulus law, while Upton and other members of the Michigan delegation supported several clean-energy projects, including a $207 million loan request from EcoMotors International to build fuel-efficient car engines.

Other Republicans, including Louisiana Sen. David Vitter and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, also have sent letters to the Energy Department seeking assistance for projects in their home states.

Don Stewart, a spokesman for McConnell, said the project McConnell backed, for plant to build electric cars in Franklin, Ky., would have created 4,000 jobs.

"There was no effort to push the administration to short-circuit its due diligence simply to plan a ribbon-cutting. And unlike the half-billion dollars the taxpayers are stuck with for Solyndra, taxpayers aren't left holding the bag for the Kentucky project's loan request," Stewart said.

Agents with the FBI and Energy Department's inspector general executed a search warrant at Solyndra' s Fremont, Calif., headquarters on Sept. 8, two days after the company declared bankruptcy.

A U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is under seal, said the search was related to a fraud investigation into whether Solyndra filed inaccurate documents with the government.

Federal agents also visited Harrison's home and the homes of two other Solyndra executives.

Harrison's attorney, Walter Brown, and Stover's attorney, Jan Nielsen Little, said in separate letters to the committee that the criminal investigations prompted the decisions to decline to testify under their constitutional right to avoid self-incrimination. Both Harrison and Stover still intend to appear at the hearing, their lawyers said.
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Solyndra execs to plead 5th at House hearing - Boston.com
 
Energy Department officials were warned that their plan to help a failing solar company by restructuring its $535 million federal loan could violate the law and should be cleared with the Justice Department, according to newly obtained e-mails from within the Obama administration.

The e-mails show that Energy Department officials moved ahead anyway with a new deal that would repay company investors before taxpayers if the company defaulted. The e-mails, which were reviewed by The Washington Post, show for the first time concerns within the administration about the legality of the Energy Department’s extraordinary efforts to help Solyndra, the California solar company that went bankrupt Aug. 31.
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The records provided Friday by a government source also show that an Energy Department stimulus adviser, Steve Spinner, pushed for Solyndra’s loan despite having recused himself because his wife’s law firm did work for the company. Spinner, who left the agency in September 2010, did not respond to requests for comment Friday.
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The e-mails show that Mary Miller, an assistant Treasury secretary, wrote to Jeffrey D. Zients, deputy OMB director, expressing concern. She said that the deal could violate federal law because it put investors’ interests ahead of taxpayers’ and that she had advised that it should be reviewed by the Justice Department.
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Solyndra loan deal: Warnings of legality came from within Obama administration - The Washington Post
 
Solyndra - $535 million- largely owned by Obama fundraiser George Kaiser.

Tonopah - a $737 million loan guarantee tied to Nancy Pelosi's Brother-in-Law.

Fisker - $525 million loan guarantee to Fisker, KARMA Electric Cars, backed by a firm that counts ex-Vice President Al Gore among its partners and Biden supported.
Biden said that they would produce over a 1,000 manufacturing jobs. ....In Finland.

NextEra - $2 Billion loan guarantee for Obama's Jobs Council cohort, Lewis Hay. Armando Pimentel became the CEO of NextEra in October, 2011, also contributed heavily for Obama. He was former CEO for Florida Power and Light company. Their is a $20 billion backlog of capital investments for FPL and Energy Resources projects which is the largest in the company's history. Recent earnings show a loss of $50 million dollars.

Beacon Power - $43 Million - Bankruptcy - Contributions to the Democratic Party

First Solar, Prologis, & Sun Power - $4.75 Billion in Federal Loan Guarantees

Sun Power - $1.2 Billion, California Demo Rep George Miller's Son, Sun Powers' Top Lobbyist. (15 Perm Jobs, $80 Million Per Job).

After loan guarantee, French Firm, Total, bought majority ownership and got $1 Billion credit line. Reports $150 Million in losses; debt at 80% of its market value.

Over $10.6 billion dollars spent plus $20 billion in backlog for FPL....a good idea?
 
Question for kokonut--post#38

Did MM dare to report any of this other than Solyndra?
I think not.
 
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