The bankruptcy of solar car start-up Lightyear will be followed up in court. The trustee of a BV related to the start-up wants the Enterprise Chamber of the Amsterdam Court of Appeal to conduct an official investigation into the bankruptcy: a serious means by which possible mismanagement can be established. For this purpose, curator Maarten van Ingen has submitted a request for a ‘company survey’, he confirms NRC. The request will be dealt with at the Enterprise Chamber on 9 November.
In January, solar car start-up Lightyear went bankrupt, shortly after the first car model had gone into production in Finland. About 500 people lost their jobs. The company, one of the best-known start-ups in the Netherlands, made a small-scale restart in February, but the settlement of the bankruptcy is continuing in the meantime.
Maarten van Ingen was appointed in May as trustee of Friends of Lightyear Holding bv. In this company, Lightyear collected money from investors, totaling about 180 million euros over the years. This company was only declared bankrupt on appeal in May, after one of the investors had requested this from the court.
For the settlement of this bankruptcy, the court chose a different curator than that of Lightyear itself, because Friends of Lightyear is claiming 180 million euros back from Lightyear. According to the court, if the same trustee had been appointed, this could have led to conflicts of interest.
Different interests
The result is that two trustees with different interests and approaches are now involved in the settlement of the bankruptcy. In addition to Maarten van Ingen, this is Reinoud van Oeijen, who has been involved in the bankruptcy of Lightyear since January. On 27 July, Van Ingen requested a so-called group inquiry from the Enterprise Chamber. If this is set up, the Enterprise Chamber will appoint an external investigator who will take a detailed look at the policy pursued.
Van Ingen says he has many questions about the bankruptcy. “For example, loans have been taken out up to fourteen days before the moratorium, for more than one million euros.” He says he wonders, among other things, whether investors have been correctly informed.
Van Ingen wants a researcher to take a broad look at the management at the company. “I think it is too easy to say: yes, this is just a start-up that has failed. You may also have certain expectations of the board there, such as monitoring the cash flow.”
Curator Reinoud van Oeijen of Lightyear is currently also investigating the bankruptcy himself, as is customary for a curator. Van Ingen thinks that this investigation will not go deep enough and wants a much broader look at whether there has been mismanagement. This can be determined in an inquiry procedure.
Lightyear says in a statement that the board is cooperating with the investigation that curator Van Ingen is conducting into the bankruptcy of Friends of Lightyear and that it cannot comment further substantively.
Curator Reinoud van Oeijen says in a response that he has taken note of Van Ingen’s request. He also says that he is awaiting the results of his own investigation, and points out that he has also engaged a forensic accountant for that investigation – something that is not uncommon in larger bankruptcies.
Lightyear, which was founded in 2016, went bankrupt in January of this year. By 2022, the company had grown massively in workforce and had begun costly production of cars in a factory in Finland. As a result, it quickly ran out of the money raised. When a new investment by industrial group VDL fell through, the company was no longer able to meet its payment obligations.
In the end, a restart was realized for approximately 8 million euros. Earlier in August, Lightyear announced that it had signed a letter of intent for a new investment of 3.5 million euros from the South Korean industrial group Sunbo.