Four Chrysler dealers shuttered during the automaker's bankruptcy have one less obstacle in their way to reopening following a US appeals court ruling. However, they still have to work things out with FCA.
We've already reported on the attempts of Fiat to purchase the remaining 41.5-percent stake in Chrysler, currently owned by the United Auto Workers' VEBA healthcare trust. And while the issues still aren't resolved, Fiat has received both a bit of good new
Fiat boss Sergio Marchionne says there's a real possibility that its majority-owned Chrysler Group may eventually return to the ranks of publicly traded companies. According to Bloomberg, the Fiat and Chrysler CEO gives that a "50 percent chance" of happening, but he doesn't appear to favor that scenario: "My preference is to be one
A Federal judge will allow some 75 Chrysler dealers to proceed with a lawsuit against the U.S. Treasury Department, according to Automotive News. The dealers insist that the government violated the Fifth Amendment in administrating the Chrysler bankruptcy when it terminated their dealership franchises.
Good news has been in abundant supply for the domestic automakers the last twelve months, and nowhere is that more evident than in the headline to this press release: "Chrysler Group Reports Full Year 2011 Net Income of $183 Million." Now, $183 million isn't exactly a king's ransom in the auto industry (or elsewhere – Apple made $25.92 billion last year). But if Chrysler is making money again for the first time since emerging from bankruptcy
2008 was one crazy, almost surreal year. It was the year when the economy took a nosedive, and the U.S. auto industry nearly ceased to exist. One of the last major decisions former President Bush made before he left office was to give Chrysler and General Motors a combined $17.4 billion to keep their doors open.
"The president is going to go after me. I'll go after him." That pretty much sums up every presidential race in recent memory, where it seems attacking the opposing side is just as important as proving your own personal worth. And the 2012 U.S. presidential election, unsurprisingly, is shaping up much the same.
New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has announced that his office settled with former White House Task Force "Car Czar" Stephen L. Rattner for $10 million. The agreement comes following charges that Rattner engaged in a kickback scheme involving New York's pension funds while he was an executive wi
The federal government spent roughly $86 billion in taxpayer money to bail out the auto industry. That's a lot of Monopoly money, folks, and when the industry we know and love was at its weakest point, early projections suggested that that the U.S. government and American taxpayers would never see $30 billion of that money. But as the economy slowly crawls back to life and cars and tr
More than 450 executives from Chrysler's white collar force, going all the way back to Lee Iacocca, have sued Daimler and Cerberus for gutting the value of their collective supplemental pensions to the tune of $100 million. The class action suit took the noted step of not suing Fiat-owned Chrysler, with the lead attorney saying that "Everybody involved in this suit loves that company and like everybody else wants to see it succeed."
Company representatives for Chrysler have been in contact with at least 50 dealerships regarding reinstatement into the the automaker's dealer network. According to a leader who represents the 400-plus dealerships seeking arbitration, the dealers contacted will receive intent letters to begin the lengthy reinstatement process.
So you're Chrysler, and you hop into the Chapter 11 pool to save your own skin. While you can wash away some of your past sins with a bankruptcy-protection filing, the deal with Chapter 11 is that you've got to come up with a way to get out of your financial pickle and return to profitability. Part of the Chrysler plan to keep its head above water was divestiture of 789 dealers, a very unpopular idea with the rejected sales organizations (and no small number of politicians, whose ears w
Planning for the future is perhaps an alien concept to big business – even automakers, with their protracted product development cycles. Take a cue of what not to do from them, then, and start planning now for next Christmas. May we suggest that your 2010 wishlist starts with what's destined to be a hotly-anticipated tome: Steven Rattner's memoir of his spearheading the bailout of General Motors and Dan Roth
When Former President George W. Bush spoke to the Montreal Board of Trade recently, he made a public appeal to the Obama administration to "get out of the private sector," adding "I hope our government gets out of the autos and the financials in which they have a stake." His premise is that it takes private companies to turn an economy around, not government-run ones.
Before there was a Motors Liquidation Co, post-bankruptcy GM's hived-off shelter for useless assets, there was Old Carco LLC. That's the company Chrysler built to house its useless assets, and unsurprisingly, it doesn't have good news for unsecured creditors. Old Carco was left with liabilities of $20.5 billion, but has less than half of that to pay off everyone it owes.
Now that the crime is over, the verdict issued and the sentencing issued, we can look forward to a few months years of the CSI treatment applied to what really happened at Chrysler. The first exhibit is a New York Times piece with Cerberus co-founder Stephen Feinberg, coming off almost as The Man Would Would Be Iacocca.
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In a case that's sure to light up our own comments section along with untold numbers of message boards across the web, our friends at PickupTrucks.com are reporting that General Motors has filed documents in court in an attempt to get New Chrysler to honor its full pre-bankruptcy debt of $531,275 (of which Chrysler has so far only agreed to pay back about a third) for work on the sophisticated Two-Mode hybrid powertrain that was jointly developed by the two American automakers along wit
