|
Mail
Magazine 24...
Another
Green Energy Boondoggle
by Lachlan
Markay
May 12, 2012
Say you
invested $11,500 in a company. Shortly thereafter, the federal
government
opened an investigation into that company for alleged financial crimes.
Would
you invest another $2,500?
Thanks to
President Obama’s green energy handouts, you already did – only the
amounts
“invested” are about 10,000 times larger, and there’s no prospect for
returns.
Ecotality,
a company that manufactures charging stations for electric vehicles,
received
about $115 million from the Energy Department in 2009 to build 15,000
charging
stations around the country. About a year later, the Securities and
Exchange
Commission began investigating Ecotality executives for insider trading.
But that
didn’t stop DOE from awarding the company another $26 million in
taxpayer
money. That decision, and the subsequent financial difficulties and
delays in
the project experienced by Ecotality, have caught the ire of Rep. Andy
Harris
(R-MD), who chairs the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee on
Science,
Space, and Technology.
In a letter
to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Harris requested:
…a detailed
summary of the Ecotality project, including original project plan and
performance metrics, deployment milestones and an update on the status
of the
project with respect to those metrics and milestones. Also, please
provide a
detailed timeline of the application and negotiation process for the
original
Ecotality grant and all records associated with Ecotality…between June
1 and
September 30, 2009.
He has yet
to receive an official response to that letter, and Harris has said
that he may
seek a subpoena through Energy and Commerce’s investigative
subcommittee if DOE
remains uncooperative.
Ecotality,
meanwhile, continues to hike pay for its top executives, even as
taxpayers keep
the struggling company afloat.
Source:
Breitbart
Read this
article with links, plus others, at Mail Magazine 24
|
