Fisker’s demise was also a reputational blow to the investment company, whose managing partner Raymond Lane served as Fisker’s board chairman at the time.
Kleiner Perkins’ major political connections came through former Vice President Al Gore, who served then as a senior partner for the company, as well as through John Doerr, another partner at the firm and a major Democratic Party donor.
Doerr also sat on President Barack Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, which was tasked then with advising the president on “plans for economic recovery,” according to a White House statement published in February 2009.
Ultimately, the Administration directed $90 billion toward clean energy investments in 2009, according to a White House analysis published near the end of Obama’s second term.
While the loss of Fisker amounted to another blow to Delaware’s manufacturing economy, some saw a potential opportunity.
Levin, the state’s then-economic development director, said Hunter Biden called Markell following the bankruptcy to link the governor with “Chinese investors” interested in acquiring the auto plant.
In response, the governor’s team arranged a tour. Hunter Biden later canceled it, Levin said.
Levin said he never was told the name of the investors, so it is unclear whether they reemerged later.
But, during Fisker’s subsequent bankruptcy process, two Chinese firms played key roles in divvying up the company’s assets and liabilities.
In October 2013, one month before the bankruptcy filing, the federal government held an auction for Fisker’s $169 million in outstanding debt from the Department of Energy loan.
At the time, the federal government was the company’s largest creditor. As such, it held the first lien on Fisker’s assets.
Delaware taxpayers held the third position, behind the federal government and the now-bankrupt Silicon Valley Bank.
During the live auction, only one company submitted a bid to purchase the returns on the nearly $170 million loan balance, according to a statement of facts released in the subsequent False Claims Act lawsuit.
That company, called Hybrid Technology, was a Delaware LLC controlled by the Hong Kong billionaire Richard Li , according to several news reports.
Its bid was a mere $25 million.
At the time, many believed the steep discount paid for the loan was an indication of Fisker’s financial trouble. But federal investigators would later say that Li’s company had rigged the auction, causing the debt to be sold for too low a price and cheating taxpayers out of millions of dollars.
In 2020, Hybrid Technology settled the claims, agreeing to pay the government $29 million.
During the months following the bankruptcy filing, Fisker’s hard assets also were auctioned. Included in those was the Newport auto plant property, valued then at upwards of $40 million.
Bidders at the auction included Hybrid Technology and Wanxiang America Inc. – an arm of China’s then-largest auto parts manufacturer.
Wanxiang ultimately won the contest with a $149 million bid.
But the purchase left many in Delaware uncertain.
While Fisker had stated goals of restoring the Newport auto plant to an anchor of manufacturing jobs, Wanxiang’s plans were far less certain.
In June 2014, Levin told The News Journal that the Markell Administration was in discussions then with Wanxiang, but the company still hadn’t decided “what use of Boxwood would be in their corporate best interest.”
In apparent response to the uncertainty – and likely with an eye toward the next election – then-New Castle County Executive Thomas Gordon proposed that the county buy the site for $9.9 million .
His plan was to turn the facility into a distribution hub linked to an expanded Port of Wilmington.
Gordon assigned his No. 2, David Grimaldi, to carry out the plan, and in June 2014, Grimaldi announced the county’s intentions to Levin, according to emails obtained through an open records request.
But Levin rebuffed the idea in his emailed response, “strongly” urging the county “to wait until Wangxiang determines their interest.”
Grimaldi in response said the county and the state would have to “agree to disagree.”
“We will send the offer letter out to Wanxiang momentarily as there doesn’t seem to be a need for a meeting,” Grimaldi said in an email to Levin.
When recalling the events in a 2019 interview, Grimaldi said the county had hired a prominent land-use attorney to compose a proposed purchase agreement. Then, Grimaldi flew to Wanxiang’s Chicago office to pitch the sale.
Wanxiang officials were receptive, Grimaldi said.
“But, when I got back, I got a strange email from them that said you guys in Delaware need to speak with one voice,” he said. “It seems that there was somebody at the state who was pushing back on our transaction.”
Grimaldi didn’t want to speculate whether anyone might have been working against the county’s proposed purchase.
Markell did not respond to requests to comment for the stories in this series.
Ultimately, New Castle County never purchased the auto plant property, which sat empty until 2017. That year, Wanxjiang unceremoniously sold the 142-acre site to a local Delaware development company.
The property – once a pillar of the state’s manufacturing sector – has since been rebuilt as an Amazon distribution hub.
When reached for comment for this story, Grimaldi expressed disappointment that the county’s plan didn’t pan out, noting there had been a proliferation of distribution center warehouses in Delaware in the years since the county tried to buy the former GM property.
“We didn’t know it at the time but we were at the cusp of a boom in distribution center real estate,” he said. “It was really the best time to do that.’
