The Los Angeles Times
Kirk Kerkorian sells remaining Ford shares
The investor spent about $1 billion acquiring a 6.5% stake in the struggling
automaker this year, then saw the value of its stock plummet.
By Martin Zimmerman

December 30, 2008

Kirk Kerkorian wasn’t kidding when he said he was putting the brakes on his
latest foray into the auto industry.

A spokeswoman for Tracinda Corp., the billionaire’s Beverly
Hills-based investment company, confirmed Monday that it had dumped
its remaining stock holdings in struggling Ford Motor Co. She declined
to provide details of the stock sales.

Kerkorian owned 107.1 million Ford shares, or 4.9% of the company, in
late October, when Tracinda reported in a regulatory filing that it
had unloaded 7.3 million shares and planned to sell the rest of its
holdings by the end of the year.

Because it owned less than 5% of the company — the regulatory
threshold for reporting changes in stock ownership — Tracinda was not
required to file information with the Securities and Exchange
Commission regarding the more recent sales, such as when the shares
were sold or at what price.

But Kerkorian, who began buying Ford shares in April and spent about
$1 billion acquiring a 6.5% stake in the automaker, clearly took a
bath on the investment. Ford was trading at about $7.75 a share when
Kerkorian began acquiring his stake. The average price since his last
SEC filing in late October: $2.33 a share.

Kerkorian has had a long, if not always profitable, relationship with
Detroit. He was the largest shareholder in Chrysler before it was sold
to Daimler-Benz in the late 1990s. In 2006, he bought a 9.9% stake in
General Motors Corp. and tried to use the resulting leverage in an
unsuccessful effort to force GM into a relationship with
Nissan-Renault.

And when Daimler put Chrysler on the block last year, Kerkorian sought
to mount a buyout bid with the help of the automaker unions, but
failed.

Although Ford is considered to be in better shape than GM or Chrysler
— unlike those two, it has yet to formally request a financial
handout from Washington — the company is burning through cash at an
alarming rate as auto sales plunge in the U.S. and abroad.

Ford shares closed down 7 cents, about 3%, at $2.22.

martin.zimmerman@latimes.com

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress