Beleaguered electrical trucking firm Nikola has offered the Badger electrical pickup truck property it was as soon as supposed to construct with Normal Motors. The customer? A brand new firm referred to as Embr Motors created by car builder and tv character Dave “Heavy D” Sparks, one half of the previous TV duo the Diesel Brothers.

Embr now owns the mental property related to the Badger pickup truck, in addition to the property associated to Nikola’s deserted off-road and private water craft autos. It additionally owns the one two prototype variations of the Badger ever constructed.

Information of the deal to promote the Badger program comes at an odd time. Just some weeks in the past Nikola’s disgraced founder, Trevor Milton, introduced plans to attempt to set up Sparks and a slate of different administrators on the corporate’s board. That effort failed. Milton was sentenced to 4 years in jail in December after being convicted of securities fraud and wire fraud in 2022, partially as a result of he misled traders in regards to the progress of the Badger.

From its founding in 2014, Nikola was all the time primarily about making hydrogen and electrical huge rigs. But it surely revealed the Badger pickup in February 2020, just some months earlier than it went public in a merger with a particular goal acquisition firm. In September 2020, Normal Motors introduced it was investing $2 billion within the startup and that it might assist carry the Badger to market. Simply days later short-selling analysis agency Hindenburg Analysis printed a damning report alleging Nikola had made various false claims. That report spiraled right into a authorities investigation, and in the end, led to Nikola paying a settlement to the SEC and Milton’s departure and eventual conviction. Nikola refunded the shopper deposits for the Badger and put this system on ice.

Sparks first revealed the acquisition earlier this week in a YouTube video titled “The Nikola Badger is REAL and I Personal Them.” He stated the transaction concerned “tens of tens of millions” of {dollars}.” He additionally defined how he was given inventory in Nikola as a part of an association to advertise the Badger (earlier than this system went underneath), and that he’s a longtime good friend of Milton’s.

Nikola confirmed some particulars of the acquisition Thursday morning, when it revealed its monetary outcomes for 2023.

Britton Worthen, the corporate’s chief authorized officer, stated on a convention name that Sparks and his companion, Cole Cannon, “expressed a want” to carry the Badger to market and introduced “a number of EV-related companions” to conferences as the 2 sides hammered out a deal. Nikola is actually loaning cash to Embr to buy the property and in alternate for a 30% stake within the firm, which may “retain some worth for its shareholders” if something ever comes of the Badger or the opposite autos.

Worthen stated Nikola is clawing again 500,000 of these shares Milton gave Sparks as a part of the deal. Sparks and Cannon additionally agreed that Milton wouldn’t be concerned “immediately or not directly in any method” with these initiatives.

“Over the three and a half years since Mr. Milton left the corporate, we at Nikola have labored to remain above the fray, not touch upon his authorized proceedings, and keep targeted on the work at hand to carry zero-emission class eight vans to market,” Worthen stated on the decision. “The irony that Mr. Milton is now making an attempt to take management of Nikola, in any case that has occurred up to now three and a half years shouldn’t be misplaced on us on the firm. We’ll proceed to push again in opposition to any efforts he makes to try to take management of Nikola and we consider our administrators and administration are far and away higher for our stockholders than a slate of administrators who lack related expertise to run a clear power clear tech firm.”

TechCrunch reached out to Cannon for touch upon his and Sparks’ involvement within the venture however didn’t instantly hear again.