Federal officials announce they took in $13.5 billion from GM’s IPO

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The Treasury Department said Thursday that it had received an additional $1.8 billion from General Motors’ stock offering last month, bringing the total haul to $13.5 billion to help pay down the automaker’s taxpayer-funded bailout.

The additional money came from about 54 million in GM shares owned by the Treasury that the underwriters of GM’s initial public offering had the option to purchase within 30 days of the Nov. 23 offering. The sale of those shares on Nov. 26, added to the $11.7 billion the government received from its initial sale of shares, cut the government’s ownership stake nearly in half, to 33.3%, the Treasury said.

“General Motors’ IPO is a testament to that company’s turnaround and the significant progress we have made continuing to exit our investments and recover taxpayer dollars,” said Tim Massad, Treasury’s acting assistant secretary for financial stability.

GM received about $50 billion in bailout money in 2008 and 2009 from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Combined with $9.5 billion in previously announced GM repayments, the proceeds from the sale of shares in the IPO bring the automaker’s bailout tab down to about $27 billion.

The recovery of bailout money from GM is one reason why the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office this week sharply reduced its estimate of taxpayer losses from the $700-billion TARP program. The CBO estimated TARP would cost $25 billion, down from $66 billion in August and $109 billion in March.

-- Jim Puzzanghera