More than 1,200 pages of documents were recently released by The Department of Energy after The Daily Caller News Foundation requested records related to a biofuels company called Abengoa. The problem with these documents? They were heavily redacted, leading many to point to a cover up in the making.
The Daily Caller News Foundation submitted a Freedom of Information Act request asking government officials for email records surrounding the federal loans granted to the Spanish-based green energy company, Abengoa. Despite receiving these loans, there were whispers that Abengoa had recently ran into huge financial issues that were bankrupting the company.
Abengoa received a $137 million federal loan and $97 million grant to build a biofuels plant near Hugoton, Kansas, however operations recently stopped at this plant after just a year. The company filed for bankruptcy in Spain earlier this year, listing U.S. taxpayers as the biggest creditor.
As of September 31st, the U.S. Federal Financing Bank held $2.3 billion of this company’s debt, putting our country’s taxpayers on the line if the company truly goes under.
Kansas Republican Representative Mike Pompeo wrote to the DOE in an outrage, “To put this in perspective, the Abengoa bankruptcy exposes taxpayers to losses four times greater than Solyndra, making it the largest failure of the DOE green loan program to date.”
Upon reviewing the documents, it is clear that the Department of Energy is foolishly attempting to hide information from the public. Despite being available to the public on the DOE’s website, information such as the production capacity of the Hugoton plant has also been redacted from the documents. Although the DOE claims that the redactions conceal “personal information in the response letters” as well as “capitalized interest amounts” and internal communications that they claim are protected by the deliberative process privilege, many think there is more to this story. Some of the pages are completely redacted, obviously hiding more than just the information the DOE is claiming.