Troubled electric vehicle maker Fisker Inc. has reached a settlement with creditors that will allow it to liquidate its assets while working with owners to keep their pricey SUVs on the road.

The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in June after failing to reach a strategic agreement with another automaker that could provide it with more capital and domestic manufacturing capacity.

The global agreement reached Friday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware allows Fisker management to remain in charge for some time as the operation winds down.

That was important to Fisker, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and car owners, who filed objections to converting the bankruptcy to Chapter 7, noting the startup’s only vehicle — a premium SUV called the Ocean — has several open recalls for faulty door handles, loss of power and other problems.

“The owners strongly believe that Fisker owes them a responsibility to ensure that their vehicles are safe and operable, and that the best way for Fisker to fulfill that promise is through a Chapter 11 process,” said attorney Daniel Shamah, who represents the Fisker Owners Assn. “We can be sure that employees and the advisors who are helping the company do this remain on board.”

The liquidation plan, which details how proceeds from asset sales will be distributed among various creditors, is subject to a vote by all unsecured creditors.

The plan also calls for the owners association to have a voice in the sale of Fisker’s intellectual property, which includes the designs and computer code that were necessary to build and operate the vehicles. The owners need long-term access to Fisker’s “cloud software,” which is crucial for sending over-the-air updates to the vehicle software that controls the Ocean.

Other issues, including access to parts and long-term service, are still being negotiated outside the bankruptcy process, Shamah said.

However, with secured and unsecured claims against the company likely to top $1 billion, shareholders who invested in Fisker are unlikely to get their money back.

“It’s a virtual certainty that there will be no money for equity. There’s no way you’re going to have enough to pay claims in full in this liquidation,” said David Golubchik, a veteran bankruptcy attorney at Levene, Neale, Bender, Yoo & Golubchik in Los Angeles.

Founded in 2016 by auto designer Henrik Fisker, the company went public in 2020 via a SPAC, or special purpose acquisition company, backed by private equity firm Apollo Global Management. The company raised $1 billion in equity capital and borrowed even more, but ran out of money and only sold about 7,000 of its vehicles.

The Ocean was envisioned as a competitor to Tesla’s Model Y, but Fisker had trouble making and delivering the snazzy SUV through a direct sales model borrowed from Tesla. The SUV also was plagued by software glitches, though its ride and build were praised.

Fisker made more than 11,000 Oceans before it stopped production, according to a court filing. The bankruptcy court already has approved the sale of the company’s remaining inventory of 3,321 Oceans, which were acquired for $46.25 million by American Lease, a Bronx, N.Y., business that leases Uber and Lyft cars.

Fisker, which was based in Manhattan Beach before shutting down its headquarters and moving to Orange County, has few other hard assets.

Henrik Fisker, the chairman and chief executive, built the company to be asset light, with vehicles assembled at an Austrian factory owned by a subsidiary of Magna International, a Canadian manufacturer of automobile components.

Fisker’s most valuable asset might be its intellectual property, but it’s unclear what bids it may attract.

The settlement came after discussions among Fisker and its secured and unsecured creditors following a dispute over whether to convert the case to a Chapter 7 liquidation run by a trustee.

The conversion was sought by the company’s largest secured creditor: CVI Investments and its investment manager, Heights Capital Management Inc., both affiliates of Susquehanna International Group, a large Pennsylvania trading firm founded by billionaire Jeff Yass.

CVI argued the administrative costs of operating under Chapter 11 were draining and that were was little likelihood the company would remain in business.

However, its status as a legitimate secured creditor was questioned by the Committee of Unsecured Creditors, including U.S. Bank, which has filed a $681-million claim related to Fisker notes it holds.

Last year, Fisker sold convertible notes to CVI, receiving gross proceeds of $450 million, according to a court filing by the unsecured creditors. Fisker filed its third-quarter earnings report late, technically defaulting on the notes and converting them into secured debt.

The committee alleged that CVI profited an estimated $57 million from the sales of its converted shares, diluting the stock and driving its price under 10 cents a share this year.

Shareholders have called for the Securities and Exchange Commission to look into CVI’s and Height’s roles in the bankruptcy, including potential short selling that may have driven Fisker’s shares to pennies. Attorneys for CVI and Heights did not return messages seeking comment.

Fisker has received a subpoena from the SEC, The Times reported last week. It is unclear what information the agency is seeking.

The company is facing multiple shareholder lawsuits that focus on Fisker’s late third-quarter filing and the role it played in the collapse of the stock price. In 2021, the company’s market cap approached $8 billion before shares traded at pennies prior to the bankruptcy filing.

The lawsuits included allegations that Fisker, his wife Geeta Gupta-Fisker (the company’s co-founder, chief financial officer and chief operating officer) violated their fiduciary duties and securities laws. The company declined to comment.

Fisker’s stake in the company is now virtually worthless, but he sold about $20 million worth of shares in 2021 well before the stock declined. Fisker and his wife also received bonuses in December of a little more than $1 million each, which were disclosed last week in a bankruptcy court filing by Fisker. The company declined to comment on the reason for the bonuses.

Evan Scott, 39, who owns a Fisker Ocean and figures he lost about $50,000 on the company’s stock, said he was shocked to learn about the bonuses.

“As a shareholder and a car owner who had supported Henrik and his wife, I am seeing red,” Scott said. “They knew the company was in dire straits. They were just expediting bankruptcy by doing that.”

Cal/OSHA has fined Disney $36,000 in connection with the death of Juan “Spike” Osorio, a lighting technician who fell through a faulty catwalk on the Studio City set of a Marvel TV series.

The workplace safety agency issued the citations several months after Osorio plummeted 41 feet to his death behind the scenes of “Wonder Man” at Radford Studio Center, a spokesperson for Hollywood crew members union IATSE confirmed to The Times. Variety was first to report the news.

Cal/OSHA also fined Radford Studio Center $45,000. Representatives for Disney and Radford Studio Center did not immediately respond Friday to requests for comment.

According to Cal/OSHA’s investigation summary, Osorio and other crew members were handling lighting cable equipment that was hanging from suspended wooden platforms when a section of a catwalk collapsed underneath him. The report notes that a ledger supporting the catwalk was improperly installed, deteriorated and weakened “likely due to age, environmental conditions and repeated stress loads over many decades.”

Osorio “forcefully impacted” the ground below and was pronounced dead by emergency responders shortly after the accident. The cause of death was listed as blunt force trauma to the head, neck and legs.

“The loss of Spike was and is needless as everyone should go home safely after a day’s work,” IATSE Local 728, the lighting technicians guild, said in a statement.

“While we recognize and appreciate the work that all the major studios have done in retrofitting their soundstages since this tragedy, there are many non-Union facilities that lack the resources and oversight to make this possible. We remain steadfast in our commitment to the safety of our members, and holding our employers to their federally mandated duty of a workplace that is safe and free from hazards.”

In May, Osorio’s wife, Joanne Osorio-Wu, and mother, Zoila Osorio, filed a wrongful death lawsuit in Los Angeles against Radford Studio Center, alleging that the production facility “carelessly, negligently, and recklessly failed to construct, maintain, inspect, place, repair, design, modify and supervise work on the [catwalk] to ensure it was in a reasonably safe condition so as not to expose persons … to an unreasonable risk of injury or death.”

The family is seeking a jury trial, as well as damages to cover “past and future loss of love,” medical fees, funeral and burial costs and other expenses.

“The OSHA investigation corroborates that Radford Studio Center failed to properly maintain, repair and inspect its premises,” Erika Contreras, attorney for the Osorio family, said in a statement.

“The citations issued against Radford Studio Center reflect that Mr. Osorio’s death was a preventable tragedy. Unfortunately, Mr. Osorio’s wife and mother paid a very heavy price for Radford Studio Center’s failures.”

Radford’s lawyers have disputed the claims and said the accident could have been caused by negligence on the part of Osorio or others.

That fetid gust of hot air you may have detected wafting from Republican and conservative social media postings over the last day or two was a fabricated claim that Kamala Harris is plotting to tax everyone’s unrealized capital gains if she becomes president.

That would be a departure from current law, which taxes capital gains only when the underlying assets are sold, or “realized.”

That it’s a mythical allegation hasn’t stopped right-wingers and GOP functionaries from hand-wringing over the economic implications of any such change, and over the purportedly horrible impact on average Americans.

Here, for instance, is the far-right blowhard Mike Cernovich, in tweeting Tuesday on X: “If you own a house, subtract what you paid for it from the Zillow estimate. Be prepared to pay 25% of that in a check to the IRS. That’s your unrealized capital gains taxed owed under the Kamala Harris proposal.”

And Chicago venture investor Robert Nelson: “Taxing unrealized gains is truly the most insane, economy destroying, innovation killing, market crashing, retirement fund decimating, unconstitutional idea, which was probably planted by Russia or China to destroy the economy. Dems need to run away from this wildly stupid idea.”

All right, guys, take a deep breath. Harris hasn’t proposed taxing your unrealized capital gains, or mine. What she has said, as the Harris campaign told me, is that she “supports the revenue raisers in the FY25 Biden-Harris [administration] budget. Nothing beyond that.”

So what’s in that Biden-Harris administration budget for fiscal year 2025?

The budget plan does indeed call for taxation of unrealized capital gains held by the country’s uber-rich. That’s part of its proposal for a 25% minimum tax on the annual income of taxpayers with wealth of more than $100 million — a wealth tax. If you’re a member of that cohort, lucky you. But at that level of affluence you don’t have grounds to complain about paying a minimum 25% of your annual income.

Anyway, there aren’t very many of you “centi-millionaires,” as the category is known—10,660 in the U.S., according to a 2023 estimate. That includes a handful of centi-billionaires such as Elon Musk ($249 billion, according to Forbes), Jeff Bezos ($198.5 billion) and Mark Zuckerberg ($185.3 billion). It’s doubtful that anyone in this category is poring over Zillow estimates to calculate the sale value of his or her house (or houses).

Several other proposals in the budget plan are relevant to taxes on the wealthy. One would restore the top income tax rate of 39.6%, which was cut to 37% in the Republicans’ 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act; Biden proposed to allow that cut to expire as scheduled next year. The restored top rate would apply to income over $731,200 for couples, $609,350 for singles, starting with this year’s income.

Another provision would raise the tax rate on capital gains and dividends to the same rate charged on ordinary income — but only on annual income exceeding $1 million for couples ($500,000 for single filers). Under current law, capital gains and dividends get a huge break: The top rate is 20%, though it’s zero for couples with income of $89,250 or less ($44,625 for singles), and 15% for those with income more than that but less than $553,850 ($492,300 for singles).

The preferential rates on cap gains “disproportionately benefit high-income taxpayers and provide many high-income taxpayers with a lower tax rate than many low- and middle-income taxpayers,” the White House explains. They also “disproportionately benefit White taxpayers, who receive the overwhelming majority of the benefits of the reduced rates.”

The proposal would also eliminate the notorious step-up in basis enjoyed by heirs. Currently, if those inheriting stocks, bonds, real estate or other capital assets sell those assets, they’re taxed only on the difference between what they were worth at the time of the original owner’s death and their value upon the subsequent sale — not the difference between what they cost when purchased (the “basis”) and what they were worth when ultimately sold.

This process turns the capital gains tax into what the late Ed Kleinbard, the tax expert at USC, called America’s only voluntary tax. Since owners of capital assets don’t pay tax on their appreciation in value until they’re sold, they can defer the tax indefinitely by simply not selling. When they die, the step-up in basis extinguishes the prior capital gains liability forever, leaving only a tax on any gains for the heirs reaped starting from the date of their inheritance.

And rich families can enjoy the benefits of their capital portfolio by borrowing against it, never having to sell. That’s an option seldom available to the ordinary taxpayer, who may have to sell to make ends meet. This is how those families perpetuate their fortunes without paying their fair share of income tax.

The Biden plan would repeal the step-up for heirs by levying the capital gains tax on the bequeathed asset, calculated from the original purchase and charged to the decedent’s estate. Inheritances by spouses would be exempt, and the existing exemption of $250,000 in gains per person on the transfer of a principal residence would remain in effect.

Biden’s plan also would increase the net investment income tax and Medicare tax rates to 5% each from the current 3.8% on income over $400,000. That would bring the top capital gains rate to 44.6%.

Is that a lot? Too much? Not enough? It’s true that the capital gains tax has typically been lower than the tax on ordinary income, reaching as high as 40% only briefly in the 1970s. Overall, however, it’s a relative pittance in postwar terms: The top tax rate on ordinary income was 90% or higher from 1944 through 1963, 70% from 1965 through 1981, and 50% from 1981 through 1986. Americans enjoyed unexampled prosperity throughout most of that time span.

That brings us back to the wealth tax idea, which terrifies the rich and their water-carriers in the press and punditocracy. Noah Rothman of the right-wing National Review, for example, got especially exercised over Michelle Obama’s critique of “the affirmative action of generational wealth” in her speech at the Democratic convention Tuesday night.

“The idea that accumulating material wealth and bequeathing it to your offspring with the hope that they build on it and do the same for their children is one of the fundaments of the American social compact,” Rothman grumbled. “Trying to make that sense of industry into a source of shame is absurd.”

The idea that the offspring of millionaires and billionaires are building on their inherited wealth is pretty, but in practice rare. As the wealth management firm UBS reported, last year for the first time in the nine years that it had been tracking extreme wealth, billionaires “accumulated more wealth through inheritance than entrepreneurship.” This “great wealth transfer,” it added, “is gaining momentum.”

As I’ve written before, the concentration of wealth in America has reached levels that make the gilt of the 19th century Gilded Age look like dross. In the U.S. there were 66 billionaires in 1990, and about 750 in 2023.

Critics of a wealth tax often assert that it’s unworkable because it’s hard to value non-tradable assets — think artworks, or almost anything other than stocks, bonds and real estate, which can be valued at a market price. The Biden plan has an answer to that. Non-tradable assets would be valued at their purchase price or their value the last time they were borrowed against or invested in, with an annual increase based on Treasury interest rates.

As for those who think there’s something un-American in a wealth tax, they can take up the issue with the Founding Fathers, who considered generationally accumulated wealth to be inimical to a free republic.

“Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison in October 1785, “it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right.”

Madison in 1792 viewed the duty of political parties as acting to combat “the inequality of property, by an immoderate, and especially an unmerited, accumulation of riches.” Benjamin Franklin urged the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, albeit unsuccessfully, to declare that “the state has the right to discourage large concentrations of property as a danger to the happiness of mankind.”

They didn’t seem concerned that fighting the immoderate accumulation of riches would be complicated or unnecessary. Quite the opposite: They would appear to agree, were they with us today, with the line beloved of equality advocates that “every billionaire is a policy failure.”

Put it all together, and it sounds almost as if Michelle Obama was channeling the Founders. And if Kamala Harris supports the provisions in the Biden budget plan aimed at requiring the super-rich to pay their fair share of taxes — as her campaign confirms — she’s channeling them too.