E-Mails Suggest White House Weighed a 2nd Solyndra Loan Worth Almost Half a Billion Dollars

In this May 26, 2010 file photo, President Barack Obama, with Solyndra Chief Executive Officer Chris Gronet, looks at a solar panel, during a tour of Solyndra, Inc.

Πηγή: New York Times
By MATTHEW L. WALD

Oct 6 2011

WASHINGTON — Early last year, the Obama administration was so optimistic about the business prospects of Solyndra, the solar equipment manufacturer that declared bankruptcy last month after receiving a $528 million government loan, that officials entertained the possibility of giving the California company a second loan of almost half a billion dollars, according to internal e-mails.

Solyndra ceased operations on Aug. 31 after lengthy financial difficulties, and the circumstances of the company’s failure are now being scrutinized by Congress, the Energy Department’s inspector general and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. On Wednesday, House Republicans expanded their investigation and asked the White House for documents related to Solyndra going back to the time of the president’s inauguration.

According to documents provided to Republican investigators, in January 2010, a Solyndra lobbyist e-mailed a White House aide and referred to their conversation about a “phase 2 loan guarantee application” that was “poised to impact jobs creation in 2010 on the order of doubling our Phase 1 jobs.”

Late Tuesday, House Democrats released an e-mail exchange between officials of the Office of Management and Budget on May 24, 2010, that suggested the second application was for $469 million. President Obama visited the factory on the next day,despite growing concerns about the company’s financial problems.

The first loan, which was provided under a loan guarantee program for alternative energy projects passed as part of the 2009 stimulus law, helped the company build a factory in Fremont, Calif., that produced 3,000 temporary construction jobs. Another 1,000 people worked in the plant until it shut down. Solyndra, which bet on an expensive new technology for solar power arrays, could not compete against cheaper panels made using more traditional techniques.

An Energy Department spokesman said on Wednesday that Solyndra’s second loan application did not go far.

“The career staff at the department had only barely begun to do the due diligence that would have been required for a second loan,” said the spokesman, Damon LaVera. “This application would have had to undergo many more months of analysis before being approved, but the department and Solyndra mutually agreed that the application should not receive further consideration” until the first factory was completed.

Solyndra got conditional approval for its first loan in March 2009. In August of that year, an Energy Department official predicted in an internal e-mail that the company would run out of cash in September 2011.

In December 2009, just before the lobbyist’s e-mail about the second loan, a venture capitalist who had put money into Solyndra e-mailed Lawrence H. Summers, then the president’s top economic adviser, to say that a loan guarantee for the company was “good for us,” but that “I can’t imagine it’s a good way for the government to use taxpayer money.”