Sungevity’s sudden and startling fall from grace came to a quiet end yesterday after a Delaware bankruptcy court approved the sale of its assets to Northern Pacific Group for $50 million.
The judge’s order does preserve two objections in their entirety from Oracle America and Sol Systems, objections that will be heard separately by the court on May 2.
In its initial filings, Sungevity reported its assets and liabilities as being somewhere between $100 million to $500 million. The asset sale to Northern Pacific will allow the company to invest $20 million in the company immediately.
Only 34 days after it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, bounced employees’ final paychecks and became the subject of a class-action lawsuit seeking money for accrued vacation pay (among other violations of federal law), the approved sale of the company’s assets brings to a close a quarter the company’s executives would like to forget.
Popular content
A Top 5 residential solar installer as recently as last year, Sungevity’s fortunes started to dim rapidly in January, when a proposed “reverse-merger” with investment firm Easterly Acquisition Corp. collapsed, closing the door on the company’s hopes to access public capital for somewhere between $357 million and $607 million.
The transaction was supposed to provide Sungevity the money it needed to compete with SolarCity, Sunrun and Vivint Solar, but the deal failed to move forward under mysterious circumstances, with no explanation from Easterly about why it pulled out of the deal.
On March 9, reports emerged that the company had laid off 400 employees in its Missouri and California offices, with rubber paychecks hitting the bank accounts of its employees. Four days later, the company declared bankruptcy and, in what certainly felt like the final death blow, former employees sued the company alleging it broke federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act provisions by not providing at least 60 days notice to its employees before the March 9 cuts.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
3 comments
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.