GM Board Suspends Annual Shareholders Meeting

DETROIT (AP) -- If your company has no publicly traded stock and only four stakeholders, does it need to have an annual shareholders meeting?

At the new General Motors Co., the answer is no, at least for the time being.

The new GM says its old board has indefinitely postponed plans to hold the annual meeting that had been scheduled for Aug. 4 in Detroit. GM spokesman Tom Wilkinson said he was not told when the old board made the decision nor the reason behind it.

The new GM, 60.8 percent owned by the U.S. government, emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Friday. But its stock stayed with the old GM, now called Motors Liquidation Co. Old GM is a conglomeration of GM's liabilities and underperforming assets that remains under court supervision.

New GM's 13-member board, of which eight members have been appointed, will decide if a meeting will be held this year.

Technically, new GM is not a publicly held company since its shares are no longer traded, although it plans to issue new shares sometime next year, and it also plans to release financial statements.

Shares of Motors Liquidation are expected to be worthless soon, but they were trading late Thursday at 39 cents, down 16 cents, or almost 29 percent.

Aside from the U.S. government, a United Auto Workers retiree health care trust owns 17.5 percent of new GM, with the Canadian and Ontario governments holding 11.7 percent. Motors Liquidation holds about 10 percent of the new GM.

The 100-year-old automaker decided in March to move its meeting to Detroit from Wilmington, Del., to save money and be more accessible to stockholders. The meeting had been held in Wilmington since 1995.