Report: U.S. taxpayers lost $11.2B on General Motors bailout

NEW YORK — A new report says taxpayers lost $11.2 billion on the government’s bailout of General Motors.

The estimate comes from a quarterly report to Congress by a government watchdog that oversees the bailout, and is up from a previous estimate of $10.5 billion.

The Detroit automaker needed the $49.5 billion bailout to survive its bankruptcy restructuring in 2009. The company went public again in November 2010, and the government sold its last shares of GM in December. The report says the Treasury Department wrote off an $826 million administrative claim against General Motors Co. in March, ending its involvement with the company.

In an interview last year, Special Inspector General Christy Romero said there was “no question” the department and the taxpayers would lose money on GM.

In July the agency said the government lost $2.9 billion on the bailout of Chrysler, which cost $12.5 billion.

Only one auto company is still partly under government control: auto lender Ally Financial Inc. Ally is the former financing business of GM, and earlier this month it went public again with an IPO that raised $2.38 billion. The Treasury Department owns a 17 per cent stake in the company.

The Treasury Department allocated $474.8 billion to the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, to bail out banks, insurers, auto companies and others during the financial crisis. Auto companies received $79.7 billion, and the department has received $59.1 billion in repayments.

© 2014 The Canadian Press