Better Place is back up for sale after the Supreme Court rejected a petition by Tsahi Merkur and his company Success Assets to delay the Central District Court ruling to cancel the sale of the electric car venture, which is in liquidation.
The sale deal was cancelled after the liquidators refused to accept a check deposited by Success Ventures owner Merkur's EV Net Group, as exclusively revealed earlier this month by "Globes."
Merkur gave Better Place Israel's liquidators a down payment of $508,906 for the acquisition of the company. The down payment was in the form of a check from JPMorgan Chase Bank of the US, amounting to 20% of the NIS 11 million price for the company. The check was delivered to the liquidators on Monday, but they say that the check is anonymous, without any details, including the details of the checking account owner.
An investigation by "Globes" found that inputting the check's details with Chase's telephone check verification system results in the response, "This is not a valid account".
"After the buyer (Success Assets - Y.A.) was told that the payment could not be carried out in this way, and that the check was returned the next day with a warning about breach of confidentiality, it was given a chance to correct this. But the buyer did not do this either," stated Better Place's liquidators, Sigal Rozen-Rechav and Shaul Kotler, in an urgent motion to the Lod District Court on Wednesday to order the buyer to act pursuant to the sale agreement of August 25.
They added, "There can be no question that the providing of this check does not constitute payment, since the money was not received in the liquidators' account, and the buyer is therefore in fundamental breach of the sale agreement."
The liquidators added, "The buyer's conduct since the date the sale agreement was signed has been devious and evasive. From the beginning, the buyer has done everything he could to raise obstacles in various ways, and has refused to cooperate with the special managers."
Better Place went into liquidation in May.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on October 17, 2013
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2013