Bankrupt solar panel maker Solyndra’s two top executives declined to answer questions Friday from the House Energy & Commerce’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Friday, invoking their Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination.
That’s an abrupt change of attitude for the company, since over the past several years, it’s spent $1.8 million on Washington lobbyists to tell its story, according to the New York Times.
The Times‘ story Friday outlines how Solyndra hired six firms with ties to members of Congress and the White House to influence the outcome of its half a billion dollar loan guarantee. None of the other solar firms that ended up winning federal loan guarantees from the Department of Energy spent any money on lobbyists.
The Times story also mentions how Solyndra’s company spokesman David Miller was painting a sunny picture of the Fremont, Calif.-based firm’s prospects to the White House all the way through May of this year even though the company was struggling.
That account is bolstered by the company’s bankruptcy filing, which shows that the company spent much of 2011 desperately looking around for more money and financing as it kept sinking deeper and deeper into a financial hole.
The filing, which includes a declaration of Solyndra’s Chief Financial Officer W.G. Stover, says that even after the company restructured its debt in February, it needed to raise additional money to pay for its debt because it wasn’t generating any cash flow from its operations.
Nevertheless, Solyndra’s President and CEO Brian Harrison sent the members of the House Subcommittee a letter in July with some carefully chosen statistics that showed that the company was fruitfully employing people with the stimulus money that it received, and growing its revenues. There was no mention of its debt issues.
The Times story cites industry analysts and the Government Accountability Office saying that the administration should have vetted the loan guarantee application from Solyndra more carefully than it did.
But the administration has pushed back against criticisms, saying that it couldn’t have predicted the turn of world events that led to Solyndra’s downfall, including the flooding of the market by cheaper Chinese products, and the fall-off in demand from Europe due to many European countries’ fiscal problems.
The Department of Energy has gone so far as to compile a timeline of events in the handling of the Solyndra loan guarantee application to show that the vetting process began well before President Obama got into office.
On Friday, members of the House subcommittee will attempt to get some answers out of Harrison and Stover, but it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to extract anything substantive.
The Associated Press reports that the FBI’s investigation into Solyndra is over the question of whether its executives were honest with the information that they supplied DOE when they made their loan application.
As a result, the two executives have each retained top-of-the-line white collar crime attorneys. Harrison has Walter Brown from Orrick. Stover has Jan Little from Keker & Van Nest. The attorneys have written to the committee explaining their clients’ decision to invoke their constitutional right to avoid self-incrimination.
