Detroit - General Motors finance chief Chris Liddell, who was passed over for the top job at the automaker last year, is leaving the company.
Liddell, 52, who joined GM last year from Microsoft Corp, will leave on April 1, the company said on Thursday.
Liddell saw GM through its record $23-billion IPO last November after the company emerged from a government-sponsored bankruptcy. Replacing him is former Morgan Stanley banker Dan Ammann, who is now GM's finance vice president and treasurer. GM's board was apprised of the change this week.
Liddell's sudden departure renewed concerns about GM's stability and performance that many analysts had credited the automaker with having put behind it in recent months.
The company has had four chief executives in the last two years. Ammann will be the fourth CFO in the last three.
“Investors want to see stability in the management,” said Josef Schuster, founder of iPox Schuster, a fund that specialises in investing in newly public companies, including GM. “From GM, you just don't see that.”
GM's financial management and accounting systems had been singled out for criticism by the Obama administration's autos task force as a contributing factor in the company's 2009 collapse.
But Liddell had been credited with tightening controls on accounting and bringing a new commitment to paying down debt and pension shortfalls in order to build a “fortress balance sheet” that would protect GM during the next downturn.
“While the old GM culture needed to be fixed, the recent high turnover indicates that the new GM management team is still integrating,” Barclays Capital analyst Brian Johnson said in a note for clients.
The change in the CFO position follows several other recent changes or promotions in GM's senior management team, allowing Chief Executive Officer Dan Akerson to put his stamp on the automaker.
“We have tried to reconfigure the focus of the company,” he said, when asked on a conference call about the turnover.
Liddell's exit also clears the road to the top for Mark Reuss, whom insiders see as a potential successor to Akerson.
The 47-year-old Reuss, who has spent his career at GM and was promoted to North American president by then-CEO Ed Whitacre, is known as a “car guy” and frank speaker who has been critical of the way GM management focused on financial aspects over the quality of its vehicles before its restructuring.
Last month, GM posted a full-year profit that was its first since 2004 and its largest since 1999, but its shares fell below the IPO price as investor concerns shifted to rising oil prices and the higher costs of launching and selling new cars.
The IPO was needed to allow GM to start paying back the Obama administration for its $50-billion bailout and a US Treasury spokesperson said on Thursday that federal officials were notified of the management change, but not involved in it. The US government owns a third of GM's outstanding shares.
Akerson also said the change had nothing to do with the company's performance in the first quarter, saying the fast start the company targeted was “intact”. - Reuters
