Complete Solaria Names T.J. Rodgers CEO - Seite 2

Complete Solaria also announced the promotion of Brian Wuebbels, its current Chief Financial Officer, who also has an MBA and a degree in mechanical engineering, to the position of Chief Operating Officer reporting to Rodgers. Wuebbels said, “Last year, I made the decision to move on from Complete Solaria in order to take the next step in my career, but I agreed with T.J. Rodgers to stay behind for a quarter to make sure that CSLR’s first full physical audit and SEC 10K report filing were on time and error-free. I now look forward to taking our solar operations to the next level in yield, quality and cycle time.”

T.J. Rodgers continued, “We now have senior leadership in place at Complete Solaria with strong retention packages under our new employee option program. This will allow me to focus on strategy and shareholder value – and since we have less than $1 million in cash, that must start with converting our debt to equity, as I have just done personally. I am now convinced that Andrew Kapp’s plan from the Carlyle playbook is to keep kneeling on our neck while allowing us to build value, and then to strip the newly created assets from the company. You can read more about Carlyle’s destructive tactics in a new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gretchen Morgenson, entitled These Are The Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs – and Wrecks – America. Carlyle’s website piously and hypocritically claims ‘As a global firm we work together to create long-term value for our investors, companies, shareholders, people and communities.’ The Carlyle chapter in the new book tells a completely different story of how Carlyle acquired the Toledo-based health care company, HCR ManorCare – an operator and owner of over five hundred nursing homes – then stripped out and sold the company’s facilities to a real estate broker for $6.6 billion, eventually bankrupting the company with high rent payments on the properties it once owned. The playbook comes from Carlyle founder, David Rubinstein, who is quoted in Plunderers as having rationalized his destructive takeover with: ‘While we’re not perhaps guardian angels, we are providing a social service…making companies more efficient.’ Based on this and our experience, it seems a more accurate Carlyle mission statement would read like this: ‘We buy or take over companies using high-interest loans with complex covenants and high penalties, and then strip and sell their assets for a profit.’