$50 Million Into the Toilet? Another Obama "Green Energy" Company Gets Flushed

It was a feel good idea (if you believe the global warming scam and that the government should pick winners and losers in the marketplace).  VPG (the Vehicle Production Group) the company that created Michael Bloomberg's "taxi of the future," received a $50 Million dollar loan from the energy departmetn to support the development of the six-passenger MV-1; a factory-built, wheelchair-accessible vehicle that will run on compressed natural gas. 

According to the Dept of Energy

Vehicle Production Group estimates that at full capacity, the project will produce up to 22,000 vehicles annually (including both gasoline and compressed natural gas vehicles). Between production, part suppliers, sales, and marketing, the project is expected to create 900 permanent jobs.

Less than a year after closing on the loan, VPG began production and hundreds of their vehicles were on the road, and one year after that the only thing VPG is manufacturing is jobs at their bankruptcy attorney's office.

Actually they arent even creating those jobs. About 100 staff were laid off and its Allen Park offices shuttered, but the company did not file for bankruptcy reorganization.

VPG received its Energy Department loan under the same clean-energy "cash for turkeys" programs that provided $527 million to electric car maker Fisker Automotive and $249 million to battery maker A123 Systems, both of which are now in bankruptcy.

“While this is unfortunate news about a very promising company,” Department of Energy spokesman Aoife McCarthy said in an e-mail to the Free Press, “it is the exception rather than the rule for our portfolio of more than 30 projects that are supporting tens of thousands of American jobs and making our country more competitive.”

You may remember the driving force behind the VPG loan. In 2011, the Washington Post reported VPG was part of the portfolio of companies under Washington, D.C.-based investment firm Perseus whose vice chairman, James Johnson, was an adviser to and fund-raiser for Obama.

Perseus said at the time that Johnson played no role in procuring the loan.  And we know that no one in this administration would ever lie about anything!