On May 26, 2011, the White House posted this video praising Solyndra as a Recovery Act success story.
Barack Obama’s gleaming example of green technology – Solyndra – filed for bankruptcy in August. The solar panel manufacturer squandered $535 million of stimulus money in a little over a year.
Why Solyndra?
Top Obama bundler George Kaiser made multiple visits to the White House in the months before the company was granted a $535 million loan from the government. And top Solyndra officials also made numerous visits — 20 — to the White House, according to logs and reporting by The Daily Caller. Solyndra officials in the logs included chairman and founder Christian Gronet and board members Thomas Baruch and David Prend. The company secured the $535 million loan despite the fact that it was widely known Solyndra was in deep economic trouble and had negative cash flows since its inception.
Kaiser said he did not use political influence or talk to administration officials about a massive government loan to Solyndra. However, the Solyndra investor made multiple visits to the White House in the week before the Department of Energy approved a $535 billion guaranteed loan to Solyndra on March 20, 2009
(Solyndra)
Then there’s this…
The Obama Administration knew that Solyndra was breaking the terms of its loan in December 2010 but gave them more favors anyway.
Bloomberg reported:
The Energy Department knew Solyndra LLC was violating terms of its U.S. loan by December and agreed to keep providing taxpayer support for the solar-panel maker that filed for court protection nine months later.
Damien LaVera, a spokesman for the Department of Energy, said officials were aware that Solyndra had failed to set aside $5 million, due in December, as the first of six payments under the loan-guarantee agreement.
“In the fall of 2010, Solyndra informed DoE that it was having major cash flow problems and would face bankruptcy in early 2011 if new capital could not be raised,” LaVera said in an e-mail today.
Solyndra executives and the Energy Department negotiated new terms for the $535 million loan guarantee in January, more than a year after the U.S awarded the company the first loan package funded with economic stimulus money. The revised agreement didn’t require the $5 million payments, LaVera said.
“Based on the information we had available to us at the time, we concluded that this restructuring gave us the best chance to protect the government’s investment by putting the company in a better position to repay the loan,” LaVera said.
Documents released this month showed the company was a month away from running out of cash in December 2010, before the loan agreement was restructured.
The new terms placed government debt in a subordinate position to $75 million from investors in the event of a default. Solyndra filed for bankruptcy protection on Sept. 6. Two days later, its offices were raided by FBI agents.
