General Motors sells Ally stake for $900 million
(Reuters) - General Motors Co has sold its remaining 8.5 percent stake in Ally Financial Inc , its former auto finance arm, for $900 million, the carmaker said on Thursday.
GM said the transaction will result in a $500 million gain to be treated as a special item in the fourth quarter.
The identity of the buyers of the unlisted Ally shares was not immediately known. A GM spokesman declined to disclose who purchased the stake.
Ally, formerly known as GMAC, was a unit of GM until private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management bought a majority stake in the lender in 2006. Burned by bad mortgages that its subsidiary Residential Capital made during the housing bubble, Ally later received a $17.2 billion federal bailout.
Ally has taken steps to streamline operations since then, including selling many of its international businesses.
In November, Ally sold $1.3 billion of unlisted shares to a group of investors, a transaction that helped enable the bank to make a $5.9 billion payment to the U.S. Treasury, which still has majority ownership. Ally has repaid around 70 percent of the taxpayer funds it had received.
News of the sale comes a day after a federal judge approved the bankruptcy exit plan of ResCap, Ally's home loan subsidiary, which declared bankruptcy in 2012 to limit the damage from ongoing mortgage woes.
(Reporting by Peter Rudegeair in New York; editing by Matthew Lewis)
