Defending Solyndra is as bad as defending Tony Weiner. Let's acknowledge the known facts:
Obama campaign bundlers pressured DOE personnel to forego their normal procedures:
treasury.gov
.....
The August 2009 e-mails, released exclusively to The Washington Post, show White House officials repeatedly asking OMB reviewers when they would be able to decide on the federal loan and noting a looming press event at which they planned to announce the deal. In response, OMB officials expressed concern that they were being rushed to approve the company’s project without adequate time to assess the risk to taxpayers, according to information provided by Republican congressional investigators.
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One e-mail from an OMB official referred to “the time pressure we are under to sign-off on Solyndra.” Another complained, “There isn’t time to negotiate.”
“We have ended up with a situation of having to do rushed approvals on a couple of occasions (and we are worried about Solyndra at the end of the week),” one official wrote. That Aug. 31, 2009, message, written by a senior OMB staffer and sent to Terrell P. McSweeny, Biden’s domestic policy adviser, concluded, “We would prefer to have sufficient time to do our due diligence reviews.”
...
articles.washingtonpost.com
ABC reported:
An elite Obama fundraiser hired to help oversee the administration’s energy loan program pushed and prodded career Department of Energy officials to move faster in approving a loan guarantee for Solyndra, even as his wife’s law firm was representing the California solar company, according to internal emails made public late Friday.
“How hard is this? What is he waiting for?” wrote Steven J. Spinner, a high-tech consultant and energy investor who raised at least $500,000 for the candidate before being appointed to a key job helping oversee the energy loan guarantee program. “I have OVP [the Office of the Vice President] and WH [the White House] breathing down my neck on this.”
Many of the emails were written just days after Spinner accepted a three-page ethics agreement in which he pledged he would “not participate in any discussion regarding any application involving [his wife's law firm] Wilson [Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati].”
The $535 million loan to Solyndra was ultimately approved in 2009 and for months was touted by President Obama as a model of his efforts to create new jobs in the emerging field of clean energy. But in late August, the company abruptly shut its doors and days later declared it was filing for bankruptcy.
thegatewaypundit.com
In addition, the DOE subordinated the Treasury's interest behind other creditors:
........ There is one very slippery fact that I am wondering about. It has to do with subordination. This a legal issue on who gets paid first in a bankruptcy. In all cases the equity is last on the list. But that is not the situation with Solyndra/Kaiser. From Bloomberg:
In February, Solyndra and its lenders reorganized the company’s debts, putting the U.S. loan behind $69.3 million owed to other lenders, including an affiliate of Solyndra’s biggest shareholder, Argonaut Ventures. This kind of stuff is not supposed to happen. The equity interest of the Kaiser family got a preference as to the right of repayment from Solyndra. Kaiser got in front of the line. He got in front of the US Government’s $528mm IOU from Solyndra. Kaiser got in front of the interests of the American taxpayer.There had to be some very serious arm-twisting going on in the background to achieve this feat.
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Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/a-closer-look-at-obamas-connection-with-the-solyndra-boondoggle-2011-9#ixzz2JZuYI827
Leon Wolf:
The news is coming in fast and furious on the Solyndra scandal, which is now looking like it may become one of the prime campaign issues in 2012. In addition to the revelation that the Obama administration pressured the OMB to approve the loan guarantees to Solyndra in order to preserve Vice President Biden’s photo op, more details are coming out about the Solyndra’s collapse, and it looks increasingly like this was one of the most crooked government boondoggles ever. The details are so bad, the mainstream media is now giving them extensive coverage. I’ll give you the conclusion up front: when it was obvious in February 2011 that Solyndra was going to go under and someone was going to take a financial bath, the Obama administration ensured that friends and donors of Barack Obama were protected while the American taxpayers were left out to dry.
For example, ABC news is reporting that DoE officials warned before the loan was even approved (in 2009) that Solyndra would go bankrupt in September 2011, a prediction which turned out to be 100% accurate. The Obama administration ignored this warning and pressured the OMB to approve a loan to a company founded by one of President Obama’s biggest bundlers, George Kaiser, who visited the White House 16 times in the last two years on behalf of Solyndra. In the wake of Congressional hearings today, it was revealed that it was obvious that Solyndra was going to go under and that someone was going to take a bath on the entire project. In order to delay the PR debacle, the DoE secured bridge financing in the amount of $75M. In exchange for this financing, the DoE allowed the taxpayers’ interest to be subordinated to the interests of the private investors in bankruptcy.
... prairiepundit.blogspot.com!/2011/09/administrations-decision-to-subordinate.html
Then when Solyndra went bankrupt, insiders were allowed to buy the companies assets cheaply:
Solyndra sold assets cheaply to insiders days before bankruptcy
Washington Times:
Fast running out of money, solar-panel maker Solyndra LLC last summer sold off nearly $60 million worth of inventory for less than $20 million in cash to a newly formed corporate entity closely tied to the company’s biggest investors, records show.
Backed by $535 million in federal loan guarantees but burning through the little cash it had left, Solyndra made its first sale in late July to a corporate entity that had been formed just a day earlier. Three more transactions followed over the next few weeks with the same buyer, Solyndra Solar II.
By the time the last sale took place on Aug. 29 — two days before the company announced plans to file for bankruptcy — Solyndra had sold off a total of $58.1 million worth of inventory for $17.5 million, according to documents Solyndra attorneys filed last month in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware.
The sales began at a time when Solyndra officials were trying hard to assure lawmakers and the public of the company’s prospects amid increasing questions about the company’s financial health. Inside the company, the sales transactions show, officials were moving fast to raise cash and buy Solyndra more time.
Todd Zywicki, bankruptcy professor at the George Mason University School of Law, said it’s not unusual for troubled companies to sell off assets to improve liquidity. But he said the inventory sales figure cited by Solyndra — $58.1 million in inventory for $17.5 million in cash — seems unusual.
“The test under the bankruptcy code is whether the sale was for reasonably equivalent value and selling inventory at such a huge discount raises real concerns,” he said. “If Solyndra Solar II is owned or controlled by any insiders or anything like that, then it becomes even more suspicious.”
Solyndra Solar II was formed in Delaware by affiliates of Solyndra’s debtor in possession lender — investors Argonaut Private Equity and Madrone Capital Partners — as well as other debt holders, bankruptcy and government records show. Another special-purpose entity, Solyndra Solar LLC, was formed to purchase the company’s accounts receivable.
Argonaut is the investment arm of a foundation headed by billionaire Oklahoma businessman George Kaiser. Madrone Partners has ties to Wal-Mart’s Walton family.
But rest assured, Jellyhead says there was no corruption here, why everyone involved in Solyndra was as upright as Tony Weiner. |
