Texas’s consumer watchdog has reached a deal with a Dallas manufacturer that once sold solar panels that weren’t quite “Made in the U.S.A.,” despite their label, the Wall Street Journal Bankruptcy Beat blog reported yesterday. In a new settlement with the Texas attorney general’s office, officials who shut down 1SolTech Inc.’s operations earlier this year agreed that the company should pay a civil penalty of $5 million and roughly $2.8 million in restitution for customers who bought the solar panels. In court papers, 1SolTech Inc. admitted that it had bought Chinese-made solar panels and resold them as “Made in the USA by 1SolTech, Inc.” Some of the panels were also falsely labeled as having met certain testing standards, according to documents filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Sherman, Texas. Lawyers in the Texas attorney general’s office sued the 1SolTech in September 2013, accusing it of violating the state’s consumer-protection laws. The company filed for bankruptcy less than a month later and eventually shut down.
