In one of the largest corporate welfare schemes in state history, Gov. Cooper’s administration handed out in early 2022 a targeted tax break to unproven Vietnamese EV carmaker VinFast. The deal could be worth up to $1.25 billion and have taxpayers on the hook for 32 years.
Since then, VinFast has reportedly lost several billions of dollars, and its rollout has been a disaster.
Amazingly, this week things got even worse.
First it was announced that construction on their Chatham County facility is being paused. It’s not the first such delay for the factory, originally scheduled to open 2024, then delayed until 2025. This latest pause will likely delay its opening still further.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, yesterday we learned that VinFast is being sued by shareholders for securities fraud. The failing company’s stock price has plummeted by about 97 percent since last August.
This is the company that Gov. Cooper thought is worthy of more than a billion dollars in tax breaks over the course of more than three decades.
And I would be remiss if I didn’t take this opportunity to remind readers that NCInnovation propped up VinFast as a “success story” to emulate.
Moving on, we come to the case of Fujifilm, which just over a week ago received a tax break package that could total $69 million – it was the second such corporate welfare deal the multi-billion dollar international corporation received within the last four years.
Yesterday, Business North Carolina reported that Fujifilm is laying off 67 workers from its Research Triangle location. This news is unsurprising given the terrible track record of companies receiving government handouts failing to live up to job creation promises.
Someday, politicians in Raleigh will learn that it’s far more fair and economically beneficial to stop with the political favoritism for targeted corporations and instead treat all businesses the same to allow the most efficient ones to succeed.