1dec01,1,5371804.story?coll=3Dla-headlines-busines s-invest

Investor may have dumped GM stake
Kirk Kerkorian sells a second block of shares. Some speculate he has shed
his entire holding.
By John O’Dell
Times Staff Writer

December 1, 2006

Investor Kirk Kerkorian on Thursday appeared to be cashing in his
chips and exiting his high-stakes poker game with General Motors
Corp. after 19 months.

The Beverly Hills billionaire and casino mogul, who at one point this
year owned 9.9% of GM and had his own representative on the
automaker’s board, disclosed Thursday that he had agreed to sell a
second block of 14 million shares, reducing his stake to 4.95% after a
14-million-share sale Nov. 22.

But there was speculation late Thursday that Kerkorian’s investment
company, Tracinda Corp., had dumped the rest of its holding in a
third, unreported sale. A spokeswoman for Tracinda and Kerkorian said
neither the investor nor his company would comment.

Merrill Lynch & Co. analyst John Murphy said a block of 28 million GM
shares, equivalent to Tracinda’s remaining holding, was sold in a
midafternoon transaction managed by Bank of America Corp. The selling
price, Murphy wrote in a note to investors, was $29.25 a share.

If Tracinda was the seller of the stock that traded late Thursday, the
deal would have given the firm a loss of about $10 million on all 56
million shares, not counting any dividends.

But Kerkorian, who paid an average of $30.24 a share for his GM
holdings- almost $1.7 billion in all – would appear to be getting out
with asmall profit if he has sold only half his holding.

The sale of Tracinda’s second block of 14 million shares is set to
close today at $28.75 apiece; the initial block was sold at $33 a
share. Together, the two sales gave Kerkorian a gross profit of $1.27
a share, or $17.78 million.

Tracinda was required to report the first two sales to regulators
because of the size of its stake, but once its holding fell below 5%,
it would not have had to disclose information about any further sales.

On Thursday, GM shares fell 27 cents to $29.23.

The day’s news led some analysts to speculate that Kerkorian has
pulled out completely after GM’s board rebuffed his push for the
company to enter a three-way alliance with French automaker Renault
and its Japanese partner,Nissan Motor Co.

The board’s vote to support Chairman Rick Wagoner’s position that GM
didn’t need such an alliance to return its ailing North American
automotive operations to profitability told Kerkorian "that his
strategy wouldn’t allow him to do what he wanted," said AMR Research
auto analyst Kevin Reale.

Kerkorian advisor Jerome York quit GM’s board in October in a move
triggered by his fellow directors’ decision to end the alliance
talks. That initially led some analysts to wonder whether Kerkorian,
backed by York, might launch a proxy battle to gain control of the
board and fire Wagoner. But since Tracinda started selling shares,
that talk has dwindled.

"He pulled his levers and not much happened. So why stick around?"
asked analyst Ken Elias, an Arizona-based partner at automotive
research firm Maryann Keller & Associates.

"It appears to me he is exiting," said auto analyst Shelly Lombard of
bond research firm Gimme Credit in New York. "Falling below 5%, if he
still hasany stock, certainly reduces his leverage."

Lombard said she believed that by maintaining a large stake, Kerkorian
"helped keep GM’s management on its toes, so I hate to see him go."

But that’s not a universal sentiment. "He was a major distraction,"
Burnham Securities analyst David Healy said. "I hope he’s all the way
out so people can get back to worrying about what’s best for GM and
not what’s best for Kirk Kerkorian."

If the 28 million shares sold late Thursday were not Tracinda’s,
Kerkorian would remain GM’s largest individual shareholder but would
rank fifth overall. When he held his 9.9% stake, Kerkorian was the
second-largest shareholder.

Separately Thursday, GM said it had completed the $14.1-billion sale
of a 51% stake in its profit-making General Motors Acceptance
Corp. finance unit to an investment group led by Cerberus Capital
Management.

The sale provides GM with cash to help pay for job cuts, plant
closings and development of new models on which it is pinning its
turnaround hopes.

The Detroit automaker will receive $7.4 billion in cash from the
purchasers, plus a $2.7-billion distribution from GMAC this year and
$4 billion more in the next three years.

john.odell@latimes.com