Solyndra execs plead the 5th

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Top executives from a bankrupt California solar-energy company declined to testify before a congressional hearing investigating their half-billion-dollar government loan.

Solyndra Inc. CEO Brian Harrison and the company’s chief financial officer, Bill Stover, both invoked their Fifth Amendment right to decline to testify to avoid self- incrimination.

Harrison told the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Friday: “On advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer any questions.”

Stover did the same.

Lawmakers from both parties said they were disappointed but that silence from the two executives would not stop them from pursuing their investigation into a $528 million loan that Solyndra Inc. received from the Energy Department in 2009.

The panel’s chairman, Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., compared the Solyndra loan to the Great Train Robbery in England in the 1960s.

“It appears we have a great heist of over half a billion dollars and ... maybe even co-conspirators called the U.S. government,” Upton said.

Upton faulted the Obama administration for its role in the loan, saying at a minimum, the Energy Department did not complete due diligence on the company, which lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the years before the loan was approved.

He called the loan “reckless use of taxpayer dollars on a company that was known to pose serious risks before a single dime went out the door.”

Meanwhile, fallout from the Solyndra controversy continued. A solar company slated to get a separate Energy Department loan guarantee said Friday it has been told the guarantee will not be approved in time to meet a federal deadline.

The Energy Department said earlier this month it would provide a partial guarantee for a $344 million loan to San Mateo, Calif.-based SolarCity to install solar panels on 160,000 homes across 124 military bases in 33 states.

But SolarCity said in a letter to Congress on Friday that the project now appears to be dead. “In the past 48 hours, DOE has informed us ... they will be unable to finalize the loan guarantee” by Sept. 30, the company said in a letter to Upton and other committee leaders. “The reason provided was the increased documentation requirements that are the result of the current congressional investigation into the Solyndra bankruptcy.”

The announcement came after two other solar firms, First Solar and Solar Trust of America, said they would not be able to accept loan guarantees worth about $4 billion for major solar projects in Southern California because they could not meet the Sept. 30 deadline.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, California Gov. Jerry Brown and other elected officials were in attendance in June when Solar Trust of America broke ground on its 1,000-megawatt Blythe solar project. Salazar said in an Associated Press interview this week that First Solar is one of the most innovative companies in the solar industry. The Arizona-based company has two other projects awaiting final DOE approval.

SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive called his company a victim of Solyndra, and urged Congress to extend the Sept. 30 deadline by a few weeks to allow his project and others to move forward. DOE says as many as 10 projects worth more than $6 billion face the Sept. 30 deadline.