GM public float likely in 2010

WASHINGTON: A restructured General Motors Corp will get the remaining $20 billion in government bankruptcy financing over the rest of this year and could be ready to launch an initial public stock offering in early 2010, a senior US official said.

Steven Rattner, who heads the Obama administration's autos task force, said he was confident that a US bankruptcy judge's decision on Sunday to allow the sale of the automaker's best assets to a "New GM" would withstand appeals.

The decision will clear the path for the company to emerge from bankruptcy court in coming weeks and will allow the US Treasury Department to focus on divesting its stake, Rattner told reporters on a conference call. The bankruptcy judge issued a four-day stay of the sale order, allowing for possible appeals.

Rattner expects GM to name additional board directors later this month.

A former investment banker, Rattner said an IPO for a portion of the government's stake that would return GM to public ownership would need a "decently robust" stock market to succeed.

"I believe that will be some time next year," he said. "I would like to think and hope that would be in the first half of next year but I would not want to predict anything specific."

The administration was not "trying to get the last dollar" for the taxpayer's investment of some $60 billion and would not wait for a stock market boom that never materializes, he said.

The government was committed to selling its stake as quickly as possible, but Rattner added, "when you're a 60 percent shareholder, you can't sell it all in one day".

The government will receive a stake of that size in the new GM for the $60 billion in financing to support GM's turnaround, half of which is bankruptcy financing. About $50 billion of the US government's money will be converted into stock in the reorganized company, which will still be named General Motors.

GM has so far received about $10 to 11 billion of the bankruptcy financing and will get the rest of the money by year-end, though there was no set timetable for payments, Rattner said.