The gigafactory plans of Italvolt are under threat as the Italian company has sought protection from an Italian court against a claim by a creditor.
A report on Italian news site Milano Finanza stated that a judge in a court in Milan opened a case against Italvolt and appointed a commissioner to examine a settlement plan submitted by its auditors. They presented a plan for liquidation, according to the report. The creditor is Pininfarina, whose architecture division planned the gigafactory.
Pininfarina has been contacted for comment.
Italvolt, whose CEO and Chairman is Swedish entrepreneur Lars Carlstrom, had planned to open its Italian gigafactory in 2025. The plant was expected to cover more than 300,000 m2 on a site more than three times this size. The factory was due to employ around 1,600 people and have a production capacity of up to 45GWh per year. The company’s website still states this.
The court heard that Carlstrom wants to continue the project and expects finance to be in place. The news report stated that at the end of 2022 Italvolt had debts of €5.5 million ($6 million) on assets of almost €10 million. But the balance sheet as of last March showed unpaid losses of over €3.8 million, covered by reducing the capital without following up on a planned recapitalisation of €20 million.
Investment in the plant was expected to be €3 billion, Carlstrom told BEST last year. The company then was talking to 4–5 investors from Germany and Scandinavia, he said.
Carlstrom’s plan is to split the project into three – to ease nervousness among financiers, he said last year. The collapse of the UK’s Britishvolt gigafactory firm – which Carlstrom co-founded and left in December 2020 after disagreeing over strategy – made the financial community nervous and changed the risk attitude to gigafactories, he said.
A production site, a former Olivetti facility, had been found in Scarmagno and Romano Canavese in Italy’s Piedmont region. However, suspected asbestos reportedly ruled this out, leading to a hunt for a new site elsewhere in Piedmont. There are also reports Italvolt faced grid connection difficulties.
The company crisis was also attributed in the court filings to the “well-known bureaucratic difficulties of the Italian system,” as well as environmental limitations and other matters which have held up finance talks.
Carlstrom confirmed to BEST the company is involved in a court case. “We had a situation with Pininfarina, we asked for protection from the court while sorting it out,” he wrote in an email. “We have around 10 million in cash at Italvolt so no risk for any bankruptcy.” He did not respond to further questions.
Carlstrom reacted furiously to claims made in the UK parliament last May that he was “not a fit and proper person” to run a gigafactory company and did not know what he was doing. The comments were made during a hearing of Parliament’s Business and Trade Committee on manufacturing batteries for EVs by Labour parliamentarian Darren Jones.
Carlstrom’s other gigafactory project, Statevolt in the US, is in good shape, said Carlstrom. “Statevolt is doing just fine, just about to apply for building permits,” he told BEST.
The businessman has a spent conviction for tax fraud in Sweden, which he blames on an accounting error.
Photo: Lars Carlstrom, who said Italvolt has asked for creditor protection from a court.
