From Reuters:
Danish designer Henrik Fisker knows how to style a sexy car. Among his works is the BMW Z8, driven by James Bond in "The World Is Not Enough," where the sleek roadster gets sliced in two by a helicopter armed with giant saws.
Fisker's latest piece of rolling sculpture is the comely Fisker Karma hybrid sports sedan — and it may meet an equally ugly end.
The Dane's startup, Fisker Automotive, hasn't built a car in nearly a year. It fired most of its workforce, hired bankruptcy advisers and is seeking a buyer. Co-founder Henrik Fisker resigned in mid-March in a dispute with some of the directors. And despite raising $1.4 billion in private and public funds since its founding in 2007, the company is out of cash. For months, key investors have been footing the car maker's day-to-day expenses to keep it alive in diminished form.
An examination of the company's rise and fall reveals Fisker's finances started to unravel as early as June 2011, when the U.S. Department of Energy cut off access to taxpayer-funded loans — a fact that wasn't publicly acknowledged by Fisker for nine months.
That and other troubling information remained unknown by many of Fisker's private-sector investors, who put $525 million into the company from May 2011 through August 2012, attracted by rosy sales forecasts and assurances the company valued itself at nearly $2 billion....MORE
That last bit is so typical of fraudsters and their style over substance approach to the world, it is in fact one tell that can tip you before the authorities freeze the bank accounts. See for example "More Strip Clubs, Private Jets and Ponzis":...Henrik Fisker and co-founder Koehler were pulling down handsome salaries — $600,000-$700,000 a year, according to several sources familiar with Fisker's executive compensation — even after the company began laying off hundreds of employees in late 2011 and early 2012.
Considerable sums were used to burnish the image of the company as well as Henrik himself.
In May 2011, the company co-sponsored a pre-race grand prix party aboard a 146-foot yacht moored in the Monte Carlo harbor. Guests drank glasses of champagne served with flecks of gold. Clad in a dark pinstripe suit and open-neck white shirt, Henrik Fisker navigated a crowd that included Prince Albert of Monaco, whom he described as the inspiration for the Karma. The next day, Fisker took the prince for a ride on the race course in a prototype Karma....
...Sept. 2010The Dénouement: Perpetrator of $190 Million Minneapolis Foreign Exchange Ponzi Scheme Sentenced
Another tell was one of the fundraisers. From November 2012:...According to court documents made public, Cook purchased a Rolls Royce Silver Spur, a Maserati Quattroporte, a Hummer H2, a Jaguar S-Type, a Mercedes-Benz, a heavily customized Audi S8, a 60-foot houseboat (complete with a brass stripper pole), an island in Canada and a two-person submarine...
Phi Scamma Jamma: Late Stage VC Investor Advanced Equities Shutting Down (Bloom; Fisker etc.)
That's a wrap.Also:
These guys would do middle-of-the-alphabet rounds (H-round, N-round etc.) that the Sand Hill Road crowd owned at 1/20th the valuation. They invested private placement style for accrediteds, giving the original VC's a nice bump in valuation while the AE principals got to act like they were in with the in crowd.
We were dubious as far back as 2008.
After the principals were hit with attention-getting fines, the last straw came when they were ordered to make a recission offer to some of their Fisker investors.
Recissions are brutal for that type of operator, they are not ordered when investors are making money hand-over-fist and tend to be accepted rather quickly by the investor and/or their counsel....
May 21, 2010
The Company you Keep: "Bloom, Fisker and Serious Materials Raising Cash from Advanced Equities"
Aug 19, 2008
Venture Capital: "Garbage In..
March 13, 2012
Al Gore (and Kleiner) no Score? Advanced Equities Execs Under SEC Investigation for 2009 Private Placement
HT on the latest to GigaOm:
Will Fisker’s investors sue?The commenters on Katie's piece seem to be a bunch of Fisker investors who may have believed too much.
Like any group of zealots whose forecasts didn't pan out they don't question their messiahs or their own beliefs but rather concoct us/them conspiracy theories and entrench even deeper into their delusion and denial.
As Spock would say: "Fascinating".
Here's a site search for "Advanced Equities" at Greentech.
A couple weeks ago we saw "Napoli Bern Ripka Shkolnik, LLP Files Complaint Alleging That Investors Were Misled Concerning Advanced Equities Private Placements" and "Zamansky & Associates LLC Announces The Filing Of A FINRA Arbitration Against Advanced Equities Inc. And Its Officers Dwight Badger And Keith Daubenspeck" so there may be more to come.
