Coda Short Circuits on Reporting Insider Pay

Coda, the little electric car maker that couldn’t, has filed a partial listing of what top-ranking insiders took out of the company as it slid into bankruptcy:  nearly $7 million, or about 35% of the trade debt that may well go unpaid.

The partial insider-pay report includes a nearly $1.2 million loan to Steven Mac Heller, the former Goldman Sachs banker who is the executive chairman of Coda’s board of directors. And it includes a loan of more than $1.8 million to GM veteran Philip Murtaugh, president and chief executive officer of the venture, which filed for bankruptcy protection May 1.

In January, things were looking up for Coda—that’s when it decided to forgive the loans to the two, as well as another loan to an executive in charge of China operations, court papers say. Now it’s scrapped the car business and a group of existing backers, including at least one name on the insider list, has offered to forgive some debt in order to salvage an energy storage venture out of the debacle.

Coda’s electric cars may have flopped, but the company’s still on the cutting edge, pioneering new ground in making up the rules of bankruptcy to suit it. Like a number of other companies in recent years, Coda has decided not to file on the court record some of its insider pay—how much money is missing and who collected it is not known.  What the company has disclosed is only a partial listing.

“Because of concerns for privacy of certain of these officers, the Debtors have deemed it necessary and appropriate to redact from the public record payment information for certain officers,” Coda’s lawyers wrote.  The company’s bankruptcy lawyers couldn’t be reached for comment.

Coda has also decided that some of the people defined by law as insiders are not really insiders, so it’s not telling what it paid them or what loans it forgave them.

Write to Peg Brickley at [email protected].