DETROIT (Reuters) - General Motors Co
The automaker said it would begin making $1 billion quarterly installment payments on its U.S. government loan in December. At the same time, the automaker will start repaying a $1.4 billion loan to Canada, making a payment of almost US$200 million.
GM had not been required to make any payments on the U.S. loan before it matured in July 2015.
For the third quarter, GM posted a loss of $888 million before special items, interest payments and taxes.
GM, which slashed almost 70 percent of its debt in a bankruptcy funded and directed by the U.S. government, posted third-quarter sales of $28.0 billion in preliminary financial results released on Monday.
The sales results were down 26 percent from a year earlier but up 21 percent from the second quarter when the automaker was struggling to conserve in the run-up to its June bankruptcy filing.
The financial results were not prepared according to generally accepted accounting principles and were not directly comparable to past results for the automaker, which has lost $88 billion since 2005.
The U.S. government extended almost $50 billion in financing to GM but agreed to convert most of that balance into a 61 percent equity stake in the automaker.
A congressional oversight panel said the U.S. government was unlikely to recover all of the financing it provided GM.
The automaker ended the third quarter with $42.6 billion in cash and $17.4 billion in a special account created with the bankruptcy financing provided by the U.S. government.
It said it had allocated $8.1 billion from the bankruptcy escrow account to pay down the government debt.
(Reporting by Kevin Krolicki, editing by Gerald E. McCormick)
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