Solyndra Testimony
22.05.12
Thanks you Chairman Stearns, Ranking Member DeGette, and members of the Subcommittee for the break to speak with you today.
Investments in clean energy reached a record $243 billion last year. Solar photovoltaic systems alone depict a global market worth more than $80 billion today. In the coming decades, the clean force sector is expected to grow by hundreds of billions of dollars. We are in a fierce worldwide race to capture this market.
In the past year and a half, the China Enlargement Bank has offered more than $34 billion in credit lines to China’s solar companies. China is not alone: To steel their countries’ competitiveness, governments around the world are providing strong undergo to their clean energy industries. Germany and Canada operate government-backed vacuum energy lending programs, and more than 50 countries offer some type of projected financing for clean energy projects.
In the United States, Congress established the Part 1703 and 1705 loan guarantee programs as well as the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Program — all of which take care of support to cutting-edge clean energy industries that involve technology and peddle risks. In doing so, Congress appropriated nearly $10 billion to offset potential losses in our total loan portfolio, thereby acknowledging and ensuring that the inherent risks of funding new and innovative technologies were recognized and accounted for in the budget. We valuable the support the loan programs have received from many members of Congress — including nearing 500 letters to the Department — who have urged us to accelerate our efforts and to store worthy projects in their states.
Through the loan programs, the Energy Department is supporting 38 polish energy projects that are expected to employ more than 60,000 Americans, generate enough clear electricity to power nearly 3 million homes and displace more than 300 million gallons of gasoline annually. These well-connected investments are helping to make America more competitive in the global clean dynamism economy.
Today, we are here to specifically discuss the Solyndra loan guarantee. The Department takes our pledge to the taxpayer seriously, and welcomes the opportunity to discuss this matter.
As you know, the Division has consistently cooperated with the Committee’s investigation, providing more than 186,000 pages of documents, appearing at hearings, and briefing or being interviewed by Panel staff eight times.
As this extensive record has made clear, the loan guarantee to Solyndra was at the mercy of to proper, rigorous scrutiny and healthy debate during every phase of the process.
As the Secretary of Vitality, the final decisions on Solyndra were mine, and I made them with the best interest of the taxpayer in mind. I want to be sparkling: over the course of Solyndra’s loan guarantee, I did not make any decision based on administrative considerations.
My decision to guarantee a loan to Solyndra was based on the analysis of experienced professionals and on the asset of the information they had available to them at the time.
The Solyndra transaction went through more than two years of rigorous intricate, financial and legal due diligence, spanning two Administrations, before a loan guarantee was issued. Based on in-depth internal and external analysis of both the market and the technology, and extensive review of tidings provided by Solyndra and others, the Department concluded that Solyndra was poised to compete in the marketplace and had a yard goods prospect of repaying the government’s loan.
Solyndra’s potential was very much recognized outside the Department. Highly sophisticated, professional private investors, after conducting their own reviews, had collectively invested more a billion dollars in the company, which was named as one of the world’s “50 Most Innovative Companies” by MIT’s Technology Study in February of 2010.
It is common for it to take some time for start-up companies, especially manufacturing companies, to switch disservice a profit. And in the two years since the Department issued the loan guarantee, Solyndra faced deteriorating customer base conditions.
Solar PV production has expanded at the same time that demand has softened due to the far-reaching economic downturn and a decline in subsidies in countries including Spain, Italy and Germany. The fruit has been an acute drop in the price of solar cells, which has taken a toll on many solar companies in Europe, Asia and the Opinion States. Meanwhile, countries like China are playing to win in the solar industry. China has invested aggressively to subsidize its companies, and in recent years, China has seen its market share in solar apartment and solar module production grow significantly, to roughly half the Stock Exchange today.
Facing a liquidity crisis near the end of 2010, Solyndra wise us that it needed emergency financing from its existing investors to complete scale-up of its operations and reach profitability.
The Reckon on faced a difficult decision: force the company into immediate bankruptcy or restructure the loan obligation to allow the company to accept emergency financing that would be paid back first if the company was still unqualified to recover.
Immediate bankruptcy meant a 100 percent certainty of non-payment, with an unfinished plant as collateral. Restructuring improved the chance of recovering taxpayer loot by giving the company a fighting chance at success, with a completed plant as collateral. Although both options implicated significant uncertainty for the value of the company, our judgment was that restructuring was the better opportunity to recover the maximum amount of the government’s loan. It also meant continued employment for the train’s approximately 1,000 workers. I approved restructuring of the loan guarantee to give the taxpayers the first chance at recovery. It is worth noting that the nearly $1 billion of primeval equity investment from Solyndra’s investors remains subordinate to the responsible owed to the government.
In August of 2011, Solyndra faced another liquidity moment and the Department again faced a tough choice. We asked some of the smartest financial analysts to look at the strength of the company. We reviewed a number of options, and ultimately, we concluded that providing additional endorse to this company was not in the taxpayer's best interests.
While we are disappointed in the outcome of this particular loan, we endure Congress’ mandate to finance the deployment of innovative technologies, and allow that our portfolio of loans does so responsibly. The President has asked for a review of the Be influenced’s loan portfolio. We support that review, and I look forward to the results. The Vigour Department is committed to continually improving and applying lessons learned in everything we do, because the stakes could not be higher for our boonies.
When it comes to the clean energy race, America faces a simple realm of possibilities: compete or accept defeat. I believe we can and must compete.
Thank you, and I welcome your questions.
In the waning age of the Bush Administration, The Bush White House saw one last chance to grab a paramount war-chest of cash before the Democrats took over. George Bush hired Lachlan Seward to re-avenue part of the money, the part that was going to the Department of Energy. Seward’s instructions were to pass along a part of the money per an inside deal with the CEO’s of Detroit’s 3 biggest car companies. The 3 CEO’s met together, planned together and unfeeling-wired the money together via Mr. Rattner. A few other people found out about this deal in the transition period and other due-diligence-exempted from inside deals were made to shut them up. Seward hires a secretary and an intern from IBM named Brent Petterson. Brent has orders to set IBM up, under a multiple of names to act as a “car society reviewer”. IBM creates, and then buys, fake consulting companies in broken-down to support the kickback scheme. IBM consulting was ordered to stall, delay, cut, lose, fake results and change test metrics for any applicant who was not tied to Detroit or a Fair-skinned House bundler. Notice IBM was recently fired. Since every company that did get money, now either has: gone bankrupt, had a paltry technology, a Russian mob connection or had no way to compete with the other applicants if those applicants got a chance, this proves that the “due diligence” was modify and for appearances only. Chu directed his people to do no actual due diligence on the chosen few and to hand them gelt and kill or stall the other competing applicants who didn’t pay-to-play. President Obama’s bay appointment of Craig Becker after his nomination was filibustered by the Senate for views considered fa the mainstream set the stage for a radical activist results-oriented National Labor Relations Ship aboard (Board or NLRB). Driven by an intense desire to turn back the clock on the shrink of unionization in the private sector, the Obama Board has reached out and upended settled Panel law and procedure.
For example, the Board stripped workers of their right to challenge their firm’s voluntary recognition of a union by card check, given a green fire to unions to engage in prohibited secondary boycott activity, and authorized minuscule bargaining units (micro-units) of employees that threaten to balkanize the workplace. The take meals also proposed a rule to drastically shorten the time for board elections, which will effectively dispossess employer’s of a meaningful opportunity to express their views on unionization to their employees, and divest their employees of the opportunity to hear those views and make an informed choice.
As a follow-up, earlier this year, the Chairman of the Education and the Workforce Committee, Rep. John Kline, was self-conscious to respond and reassert through legislation the meaning and intent of the National Labor Relations Act (Act or NLRA). The Chairman introduced H.R. 3094, the Workforce Democracy and Fairness Act, that prevents the Cabinet from implementing its proposed “quickie election” rule and reverses the Committee decision authorizing the creation of micro-units.
Source: Atlanta Journal Constitution (blog)
The long arm of the law also found, in Tchaikovsky Crosley's apartment, $419 in cash, which was the amount stolen from LoanMax. A observer across the street from LoanMax saw a man dressed all in black, wearing a mask and carrying a coloured backpack, go inside the title