Former Tesla Exec to Be Questioned over Claims Elon Musk Lied to Investors About SolarCity

Tesla’s former president of global sales and services will reportedly be questioned by lawyers for pension and investment funds who believe that Tesla CEO Elon Musk lied when convincing them to back his $2.6 billion buyout of SolarCity.

Bloomberg reports that Jon McNeill — Tesla’s former president of global sales and services who left the company a year ago to become the COO of ride-sharing company Lyft — will be questioned by lawyers representing pension and investment funds which believe that Tesla CEO Elon Musk lied when convincing them to fund his $2.6 billion buyout of solar panel manufacturer SolarCity.

The lawsuit, which was filed against Tesla in 2016, alleges that Musk failed to disclose that he and other company directors were also shareholders in SolarCity at the time of the buyout. Tesla has claimed no wrongdoing in the matter so far. McNeill refused to comment on the current situation according to Bloomberg.

A judge stated in March that Tesla investors had successfully gathered enough evidence to raise a “reasonable inference that Musk exercised his influence as a controlling stockholder” in relation to the SolarCity buyout. Investors also successfully showed that conflicts “diminished the board’s resistance to Musk’s influence,” according to the judge.

85 percent of the company’s stockholders backed the decision to buyout SolarCity but the pension funds that opposed the deal now believe that Musk wrongly inflated the value of SolarCity at the time. Two new independent directors were hired to Tesla’s board in 2017 following claims that the company’s board was tied too closely to Musk.

Tesla’s facility in Buffalo, New York, houses much of the operations of the former SolarCity divisions. The plant has been under fire due to allegations of inactivity and low employment numbers. As a Breitbart News article earlier this week revealed:

In November, Tesla provided members of the media with a tour of the Buffalo facility which was extremely controlled, with no cameras allowed and employees being hand picked by Tesla to speak to reporters. “It was all fabricated for show,” Witherell said. “There was no actual production that day so some of the teams in their specific area were instructed to make sure they looked busy and they actually were working on the same module over and over again.”

Breitbart News will continue to follow the lawsuit against Tesla over the SolarCity acquisition.