As governor, Mitt Romney personally delivered a $1.5 million loan to the firm. | Boston Herald Konarka could undercut Solyndra

A Massachusetts solar company to which Mitt Romney personally delivered a $1.5 million loan when he was governor has gone belly up, leaving him vulnerable to the same “picking winners and losers” charges that he’s been lobbing at President Barack Obama over Solyndra.

The president’s reelection campaign wasted no time noting Romney’s support for Lowell-based Konarka Technologies, which announced Friday it had filed for bankruptcy protection with plans to lay off more than 80 workers and liquidate its assets.


The filing came on the heels of Romney’s unannounced visit last week to Solyndra’s Silicon Valley headquarters, where he accused the Obama administration of a conflict of interest and poor judgment in approving Solyndra’s $535 million Energy Department loan guarantee.

In January 2003, just less than three weeks into his term as governor, Romney handed a check to Konarka executives during a news conference that also involved giving out subsidies to four other renewable-energy companies. One of the other winners announced that day — Evergreen Solar — has already undercut Romney’s Solyndra attacks by filing last year for bankruptcy protection.

“Every day, we see a new example of Mitt Romney’s hypocrisy,” Obama campaign spokeswoman Lis Smith said Saturday. “Just one day after he pulled a political stunt outside Solyndra, we learned even more about his record of picking winners and losers in Massachusetts when one of the companies he gave a loan to went bankrupt.”

Romney and a super PAC supporting him were on offense last week over Solyndra with attack ads and Thursday’s visit to the company’s headquarters, which are still draped with a red “for sale” sign. On Saturday, Romney’s team bristled as Obama’s campaign pushed back over Konarka.

The GOP campaign noted that Massachusetts officials approved Konarka’s loan application for a new pilot production assembly line in December 2002, the month before Romney was sworn in. And even if Romney had been in office then, the agency that greenlighted the loan wasn’t under the direct control of the governor.

Later in his term, Romney tried to defund the underlying green energy financing program.

Konarka, in the meantime, went on to raise $170 million in private capital as it amassed more than 100 patents for a variety of solar products, including thin, flexible panels that its customers then build into bags and umbrellas. It also raised $5 million more in state loans under Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick’s administration.

“President Obama has a lot of questions to answer about why he used taxpayer dollars to reward wealthy campaign donors for bad ideas like Solyndra, yet he is unwilling to focus on creating jobs for the millions of Americans who are struggling,” Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said. “His distortions and distractions will not put a single American back to work.”

Republicans haven’t proved that the Obama administration steered the Solyndra loan guarantee in return for campaign contributions, though they have uncovered emails showing administration contacts with prominent fundraisers and bundlers and internal warnings that the president could suffer politically if the company went bankrupt.

Konarka CEO Howard Berke didn’t mention presidential politics in the news release announcing his company’s plans to file for Chapter 7 federal bankruptcy protection.

“Konarka has been unable to obtain additional financing, and given its current financial condition, it is unable to continue operations,” he said. “This is a tragedy for Konarka’s shareholders and employees and for the development of alternative energy in the United States.”

Berke’s statement noted that several large international companies and the Chinese government have shown an interest in financing or acquiring the company. But he said any rescue would need to take place under the supervision of a bankruptcy court trustee.

In an interview in February, Berke said Romney gave an enthusiastic speech about Konarka during the January 2003 news conference, noting how the company was spun out of research at the University of Massachusetts Lowell with the help of co-founder Alan Heeger, a Nobel laureate.

“The governor was quite supportive of us being a very exciting new startup in the state,” Berke told POLITICO.

Asked about the comparisons to Solyndra, Berke pushed back by noting his company had paid back the $1.5 million loan. He also pointed to the sizable differences in aid for Konarka versus Solyndra and the broader Energy Department loan guarantee program.

“I think taking a million and using it as a lubrication for economic development is one thing,” Berke said. “Taking billions, tens of billions of taxpayer money is quite a different order of magnitude. There’s just a shared difference in the amount of capital exposure and risk that one should be taking with taxpayer money, and I believe that one has to contrast the two situations in that regard.”

Despite the differences, Romney’s critics in Massachusetts said Konarka’s bankruptcy filing steals some of the thunder from his attacks on Obama over Solyndra.

“I think the coincidence of the timing of these two things does put a bright light on the basic hypocrisy of the assertions from Gov. Romney,” said Ian Bowles, Patrick’s former Massachusetts secretary of energy and environmental affairs. “Whether it was clean energy, IT, life sciences or the film industry, he ‘picked winners and losers’ all the time as governor and therefore lacks standing or credibility to criticize a president for doing the same thing.”

“Romney apparently at one time shared Obama’s ideals in shifting away from polluting fossil fuel energy,” added Lori Ehrlich, a Democratic Massachusetts state representative who helped advise Romney’s gubernatorial transition team on environmental issues. “Romney’s shifting on so many energy policies he once championed in Massachusetts should give American voters pause.”

But Lawrence Gasman, a principal analyst at the research firm NanoMarkets, said Konarka’s financial collapse doesn’t fall in the same category as Solyndra’s. Differences between the two companies are significant, from the ongoing FBI investigation into Solyndra to the sheer size of their arrangements.

“Somehow, it doesn’t seem like a very good argument to counter a loss of $530 million by pointing out that the man who is accusing you once lost $1.5 million in vaguely but not all that similar circumstances,” he said.

Republicans note that Solyndra has plenty of ties to Obama’s campaign. One of the company’s largest private investors is a family foundation run by George Kaiser, a Tulsa oilman and Obama bundler. Steve Spinner, an Obama fundraiser in 2008 and again in 2012, monitored the Solyndra loan guarantee while working as an Energy Department adviser.

As for Konarka, a POLITICO review of state and federal donation records turned up no contributions between top company officials and Romney — either for his 2002 gubernatorial or his 2008 and 2012 presidential bids.

Berke has given to members of both political parties — $2,300 to John McCain’s 2008 White House campaign and $1,000 to GOP Sen. Scott Brown, as well as $1,000 to Democratic Rep. Niki Tsongas and $500 to Elizabeth Esty, a House Democratic congressional candidate from Connecticut. But he has not donated to Romney.

Heeger, the company’s chief scientist, has given $900 to Obama, according to donation data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.