Officials from Abound Solar Manufacturing told the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs, Stimulus Oversight, and Government Spending July 18 that inexpensive solar panel imports from China led the manufacturer to file for bankruptcy July 2 after receiving a Department of Energy loan guarantee. The company had drawn down $70 million of the $400 million loan guarantee.

Responding to a subpoena issued by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the White House turned over 130 pages of internal communications on Solyndra to the House Energy and Commerce Committee November 11. In total, the administration has turned over 185,000 pages of documents, including 100,000 pages from the Department of Energy last week.

On December 27, 2020, in response to the economic distress caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and to supplement the CARES Act enacted in March 2020, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 (the “Act”) was enacted. In addition to providing $900 billion in pandemic relief, the Act benefits both debtors and creditors by temporarily modifying the following sections of the Bankruptcy Code, which may be of particular interest to creditors:

It has long been the law that creditors are rarely entitled to contractually prohibit a debtor from filing for bankruptcy, whether such restriction is contained in the debt instruments or in the corporate governance documents. In contrast, governance provisions which condition a bankruptcy filing on the vote or consent of certain equity holders that are unaffiliated with any creditor are frequently enforced. Many equity sponsors, for example, wear two hats: they are both shareholders and lenders to their portfolio companies.

In the recently decided case, Mission Product Holdings, Inc. v. Tempnology, LLC, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit took a hardline position that trademark license rights are not protected in bankruptcy. Bankruptcy Code section 365(n) permits a licensee to continue to use intellectual property even if the debtor rejects the license agreement.

In an earlier blog piece we reported on the Third Circuit’s 2015 decision in In re Jevic Holding Corp. where the Court approved a settlement, implemented through a structured dismissal, which allowed junior creditors to receive a distribution prior to senior creditors being paid in full.

“The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.”

                             Robert Frost, “The Oven Bird”

In the world of private equity, vast sums of money are raised by private investors who pool their money into collective funds in order to acquire companies, i.e., a “portfolio company”, with the goal of eventually flipping the portfolio company at a significant profit. Sometimes, however, that bet goes wrong, and the portfolio company is sold at a loss or, worse, liquidated in bankruptcy.

The Department of Energy announced June 28 that Abound Solar Manufacturing LLC, a Colorado-based manufacturer of thin film solar panels and recipient of a $400 million loan guarantee, plans to stop operations this week, making it the fourth company backed by the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program to file for bankruptcy. The company received a loan guarantee in December 2010 to help fund construction of two commercial-scale plants.

In a client advisory sent by our office a few months ago, we described a decision in the Madoff saga in which the District Court for the Southern District of New York (the Court) closed off a potential avenue of significant recovery for the Madoff Trustee (the Trustee) and the Ponzi scheme victims by denying the Trustee standing to pursue certain claims against feeder funds – firms that sent investors’ funds to Madof