KiOR: The Inside True Story of a Company Gone Wrong. Part 4, the Year of Living Disingenuously

It is difficult to imagine how a company could have better conveyed an attitude of fear of independent review, as if there was a scam in the works and a rush to transfer ownership to duped retail investors as soon as humanly possible.

O’Connor reaches out to Khosla Ventures, and is rebuffed

According to the State of Mississippi, “on February 8, 2012, O’Connor requested that Vinod Khosla and Samir Kaul schedule a time to speak with him,” concerning the state of technology development. Kaul refused to speak with O’Connor. Mississippi alleges that Kaul’s motives were “an effort to conceal his role and the role of his boss, Vinod Khosla, in the cover-up of the actual yields being achieved in KiOR’s pilot and demonstration units.” But there is no confirming evidence of this.

The Technology Review

On March 2nd, Paul O’Connor wrote to Stamires, and said, “this is really very weird/strange”. KiOR had a draft agenda for a Technology Review scheduled to take place on March 8th. The draft had a list of speakers and invited staff. No Stamires. Only a handful of subjects to be discussed.

“It was a fiasco,” said a KiOR team member who attended. “The discussion was heavily censored and rehearsed, and it certainly did not answer any of O’Connor’s questions regarding actual bio-oil yields and related costs. it was rigged and staged, full of smoke and mirrors.”

By this time, O’Connor was on a hunt for answers, in order to report back to the Board on the actual status of the technology. During his visit to Houston for the Review, O’Connor met privately with Stamires and discussed extensively the proceedings of the meeting, and discussed the prospect of both men making a visit to Vinod Khosla in California.